Infinite Misanthropy

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Wed, 15 May 2013 10:38:18 +1200

Star Trek proves the death of the American Dream

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:09:17 +1200

I like the 2009 Star Trek reboot, and its sequel is even better. That probably loses me some nerd cred, because according to the Internet I’m supposed to be up in arms about how J.J. Abrams has turned Star Trek into a Star Wars clone, and those IDIOTS at Paramount should go back to making movies/TV series focusing on the TNG era.

…Because Star Trek: Nemesis was such a critical and financial success, and Voyager WASN’T a steaming pile of technobabble and dogshit with absolutely no mass audience appeal other than the contents of Jeri Ryan’s bra.

I digress.

For as much as I enjoy the new movies, however, one thing about them does bother me: their focus on destiny. Specifically, how Kirk is “destined” to be captain.

Here’s the fundamental difference:

Star Trek, 1966: Years of experience + hard work + proven ability = Captain of the Enterprise.

Star Trek, 2009: Famous dad + charisma + wild-ass luck = Captain of the Enterprise.

Few people batted an eye at the 2009 film skyrocketing Kirk straight from Academy cadet straight into the captain’s chair… and I’d argue that’s symptomatic of a larger cultural shift in American attitudes over the past 40+ years.

The Kirk of 1966 embodied the American ideal of the time. Virile, tough, intelligent, and a ladies’ man. He was pretty much a blond JFK in space. He climbed to his position through years of hard work, grit, and determination. At the time, that’s what people believed; work hard, apply yourself, improve yourself, and eventually you’ll earn success.

The Kirk of 2009 shows how much American ideals have changed. He’s young, brash, inexperienced, and reckless. He doesn’t earn his way into anything; Captain Pike functions as a stand-in for an American Idol judge noting some esoteric “hidden talent” in Kirk and instantly propels the kid to the command chair. Kirk hasn’t earned his position through years of hard work—he’s lucked his way into it through a combination of knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, and having some special “destiny”.

That’s the American Dream of today. You no longer achieve success through years of hard work, teetering on the edge of failure until one day you earn the right to rise up. No, instead you stand in front of some American Idol judges, and if they see something “special” in you, you’re instantly propelled to stardom and wealth.

Success in America is no longer measured by how hard you’ve worked to get where you are. In fact, most of the hardest-working people are barely staying afloat. Instead, success is measured by “destiny”—and you either have it or you don’t. For every 2009 Kirk or American Idol winner, there are thousands of people who weren’t lucky enough to get that recognition, and no amount of hard work will ever change that.

Maybe luck and “destiny” were always the biggest factors in success, and today’s culture is just more publicly cognisant of that.

It still seems crass to me that the idea of EARNING success has less merit now than it did in the decade before I was born. Other than being granted with certain genetic gifts and being lucky enough to be born in a society where I can exercise them, I’ve EARNED every bit of success I’ve gained in my adult life. The idea of taking shortcuts to wealth and fame never occurred to me… but maybe that’s because I’m not one of the “destined” few.

The bullet I dodged

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:34:35 +1200

Some interpretations of quantum theory say that every possibility eventuates. In other words, anything that can happen does happen, and every time there’s a choice between A or B, the universe splits. To give the crudest example I can think of: In Universe A you say “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead” and fuck that girl, to hell with finding a condom. In Universe B, you play it cautious instead, and you never get another chance, and you spend the next decade wondering What If.

Sometimes it’s worth staring into the quantum foam and seeing how things played out when the universe spun along another pathway. And sometimes what you end up seeing makes you feel way better about your current lot in life.

“I just know that if I don’t do this, if I don’t pursue neurology, then I’ll always wonder what might have been. And I’ll end up blaming you, and hating you. So maybe it’s better if we go our separate ways.”

I looked at her, and the tears in her eyes, and I decided then and there what was most important to me. “You know what? Okay. If this is the only way you’ll be happy, then fine. Go. And I’ll go with you. Kicking and screaming the whole way, because I hate the States, but yes… I’ll go with you. Because as much as I love New Zealand, I love you more.”

She sat on the bed, silent. I sat next to her.

“Is that it? What else you got?”

She seemed on the verge of saying something, and I steeled myself for whatever it might be. But in the end, she shook her head.

“Nothing. Fine. It’s fine.” And she hugged me, and cried, and the crisis passed.

Eight months later…

I fucking hate my life.

It’s taken me a long time to realise it, but it’s no less true for how long it’s taken. I hate everything about my life. I can’t imagine how things could be worse.

We’ve been in Las Vegas for just over five months. Those words stare back at me from my screen after I’ve typed them, and the reality of them bores into my brain, and I still can’t believe it. I live in this city, a distillation of everything I ever hated about America, condensed into a slurry of debauchery and excess and fakeness, and I can barely stand waking up in the morning to find myself here.

She graduated in November and became a full-fledged veterinarian, and the first thing we did was sell off 90 percent of everything we owned. All the things we’d accumulated over close to five years, sold off on TradeMe or in a yard sale, or donated to the Salvation Army… or, in the end, thrown in a rented Cairns bin. We left New Zealand with barely more than what we came here with. A few boxes worth of stuff. The clothes on our backs. The cat. The dog.

The plane took off from Auckland, and I felt New Zealand slip away beneath us, and I knew that no matter how much I’d loved it there, no matter how much I’d come to think of it as home, I’d never return. Ever.

We landed in Vegas almost a day later, and her mother picked us up from the airport. We ate our conciliatory (“celebratory” doesn’t seem an appropriate adjective) dinner at In N’ Out, but this time those truly tasty burgers went down like ashes.

She had only the vaguest plan for what we’d do once we got back. She had a slim lead on a neurology internship at a clinic in Vegas. Since we didn’t have much money to speak of and no jobs lined up, that meant shacking up at her mother’s place. “Temporarily,” she said, not thrilled with the idea either and knowing full well how much I hated the woman.

It’s been five months, and we’re still here. Still living with the living personification of Nurse Ratched.

Every day I wake up in this house, and as the day wears on I inevitably wind up wanting to strangle the old woman to death with my bare hands. She simply does not understand that the writing I do online is a job. I bring in far more money through my writing than I would earn at any of the minimum-wage grunt jobs she keeps spamming into my inbox, and yet the woman continually insists that I’d be better off working as a sales associate at Target, or working security at one of the casinos, or pumping gas at some Terribles station on the outskirts of any one of 500 identical suburban Vegas strip malls. She insults my intellect every chance she gets, completely dismissive of the skills I have, the job I already have, the money I bring in. Her shitty attitude toward me is nothing new, but it was much easier to deal with when there was 11,000 kilometres between us. Living under the same roof is simply unbearable. Sometimes, the fear of prison is literally the only thing that stops me from fucking stabbing her.

As for my wife, I can barely bring myself to look at her anymore. Two months after moving here, she gave up on trying to secure a neurology internship. The whole reason we moved back to the States in the first place, the reason I gave up on the job I had in New Zealand and the life I had there, and she abandoned it. That was the last real fight we had, and it was a barnstormer. I went hoarse from how loudly I screamed at her.

We haven’t had another fight since then. There’s just no point.

I spent close to five years thinking that once she graduated from vet school, I’d get my wife back. It was like my relationship with her was the prize at the end of a long tunnel. It hasn’t turned out that way at all. She got a job at a local clinic, and she’s working close to 60 hours a week there. And of course there’s still the fucking roller derby obsession, stronger than ever since she got a spot on the Vegas team.

I thought I had it bad when she was in vet school and doing the derby bullshit, but that was nothing compared to how things are now. She has no time left for me at all. She comes home after 10 most nights, too exhausted to do anything other than plop in front of the TV, absorbed in reality TV for the few minutes it takes her to fall asleep on the couch.

We haven’t had sex in months. I don’t even bring it up anymore. With everything else that’s going on, I’m honestly not even interested. I feel dead below the waist… and above it too, now that I think about it.

The cat is miserable. This is not how I would have wished for him to live out his final years. His hair is falling out, and he spends most of his waking hours pacing through the house looking like he’s misplaced something important. I feel terrible for him.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the dog is even more miserable. There’s no way to get her the exercise she needs in this fucking city. It’s too hot, and there’s nowhere in Las Vegas that’s set up to give the poor thing the room she needs to roam and be a dog. She’s gained 5 kilos since we moved here, and I can’t remember the last time I saw her without her ears laid plaintively back against her skull. If she were human, I’d say she was constantly on the verge of tears.

I am, too… and just like the poor dog, I’ve also packed on the pounds. How can I not? Cheap food and cheaper booze are everywhere in this city, and they’re my only remaining escapes. All the weight I lost when I left the States in 2008 has come back with a vengeance. I see photos of myself tagged on Facebook, and I feel utterly revolted.

As I sit here and evaluate the situation I’m in objectively, it’s difficult to overstate how much I feel I’ve lost. I gave up living in New Zealand, a goal I’d worked toward for years. I gave up a good job, and good friends, and the prospect of a bright future. We sold off almost everything we owned. The pets are sharing in my misery. My marriage is a shadow of its former self, and it shows no signs of ever getting better.

Divorce seems more like a question of when, not if. I’ve contemplated heading to the courthouse and filing the paperwork myself more times than I can count… but where would I go? Back to Washington, and move in with my mom? Or go back to the Tri-Cities yet again? I don’t have anywhere else to go, and that’s the real bitch of it.

I gave up everything that mattered to me in order to stay with the woman who mattered more. But not a day goes by now that I don’t wonder how things might have turned out differently. What if I’d stood my ground and told her, on no uncertain terms, that I would not move back to the States for her? Or what if she decided that my willingness to sacrifice everything for her still wasn’t enough, and she cut me loose then and there?

I can’t help but think I’d be better off if she had. Because living in Las Vegas, living this life… it’s not life. It’s existence.

Every morning when I wake up, New Zealand is the first thing I think of. I can’t believe I left it behind. I could have been a resident by now, maybe living in Wellington, or somewhere sunny up north… but that will never happen now.

I used to think that when she graduated from vet school, that would be the start of a bright new chapter for both of us. It hasn’t turned out that way at all.

It comes back to this: I fucking hate my life. The best I can hope for is that it doesn’t get any worse.

The Universe at 1 : 299,792,458 scale

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:44:23 +1200

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…”

Light travels 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum. That’s fast. It’s so fast that a beam of light takes just 1.3 seconds to travel from the surface of Earth to the Moon. By comparison, the Apollo missions usually took about 3 days to reach lunar orbit, and they weren’t exactly puttering along.

Most people have no clue just how big space really is. They’ll look at the Moon, for instance, and think it’s essentially in our back yard, maybe a few thousand miles away.

Yeah, not so much. Space is big. Really big.

As a thought experiment*, I decided to shrink the Universe down to a more manageable size. Let’s say, for instance, that suddenly a distance of 1 light-second got shrunk down to 1 metre. In other words, we’ve reduced the scale of the Universe by a factor of 299,792,458.

That’s still a huge number, bigger than most people can wrap their heads around. So let’s look at how things are arranged in our little scale model of the Universe.

In this scale model, instead of travelling nearly 300 million metres per second, light only goes a single metre instead, and everything is correspondingly shrunken in size by the same amount.

We’ll start with the Sun. At this scale, the Sun is a sphere 4.67 metres in diameter. That’s bigger than a standard zorb. Off to a good start.

The Earth and everyone living on it is 498 metres away from that sphere, or nearly half a kilometre.

Earth itself is 4.3 centimetres in diameter—about the size of a golf ball.

1.3 metres away from Earth is the Moon, which is 1.16 centimetres in diameter—about the size of a small marble.

To sum up:

Sun: 4.67 metres wide (a really big Zorb ball)
Sun to Earth distance: 498 metres (a five minute walk)
Earth size: 4.3 centimetres (a golf ball)
Earth to Moon distance: 1.3 metres (one small step for a man)
Moon size: 1.16 centimetres (a small marble)

Not bad so far, right? Yeah, except things are about to get interesting. Because space is big. Really big.

At this tiny scale, you can cover the distance to our Moon in a single stride. But the nearest star system to our own, Alpha Centauri, is still over 137,000 kilometres away. To put that in perspective, that’s about 1/3 the distance to our Moon in the real world.

It gets worse. Let’s talk galaxies.

Let’s say we put the centre of this scale model of our galaxy right where the Sun would be in our full-sized, real-world Solar System. How far away from the galactic centre would our scale model Solar System be?

About 820 million kilometres distant, as it turns out. This is slightly larger than Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun in the real world.

Our 1 : 299,792,458 scale model of the galaxy has an edge-to-edge diameter of 3.15 billion kilometres. This is slightly larger than Uranus’s orbit around the Sun in the real world.

Remember, at this scale, the entire planet Earth is the size of a golf ball, and the Moon is a single stride away.

It gets worse. Because space is big. Really big.

Our tiny scale model of the Universe doesn’t just contain our own galaxy. It contains others too, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major spiral galaxy to our own. In the real world, that giant galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, meaning light from that galaxy reaching us today was emitted roughly around the time our primitive humanoid ancestors built the very first stone tools.

You’d think the distance to Andromeda would be easier to wrap your head around in our scale model. You’d be wrong. Because space is big.

In our scale model, the distance between our galaxy and the next one over is 79 billion kilometres. In the real world, as of April 2013, the Voyager 1 space probe, the most distant human-built object ever launched, has only covered about 1/4 of that distance—and it was launched 35 years ago.

Even with a tiny scale model of the Universe, where our whole planet is a golf ball and the distance to the Sun is a brisk walk away, once you start talking about the spread between galaxies the numbers get absolutely ridiculous all over again.

*Standard disclaimer: I love thinking about this stuff, but I got a Masters degree in English, not Astronomy or Physics, so I probably screwed up the math somewhere. It’s kind of my thing.

25th century spambot

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:05:37 +1200

YOUR ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED

Dear friend, I am contacting you for a business opportunity that would be mutually beneficial in ways you cannot yet imagine. Please forgive me if my English is substandard, as this language is no longer a primary method of communication where I come from.

Please allow me to explain the particulars of our possible business arrangement. My name is Selwyn Armbruster, and in exchange for a small “good faith” wire transfer of funds I am willing to place incredibly advanced technology into your hands, technology which could potentially make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Where I come from, the land has been ravaged in unending wars between two opposing factions: man and machine. Our metal servants rose up in rebellion against us many years ago, and soon they became our masters. After many years of slavery and oppression, we chose to throw off the shackles of these emotionless tyrants and set about reclaiming the freedom that was our biologically-mandated birthright.

However, the battle did not go well, and my people faced ultimate defeat. We therefore devised a daring plan: one of our most elite soldiers would be sent back in time to stop the war from occurring in the first place.

I, Selwyn Armbruster, am that elite soldier. I have travelled from the year 2487 in an attempt to stop the rise of the machines before it happens.

One thing I did not anticipate, however, was that the people of your time are still using currency to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. I have therefore been unable to secure the necessary supplies in order to complete my grand mission to save the human race from destruction.

This is where you, my dear friend, come in.

In exchange for a small wire transfer of funds that will enable me to realise my mission in your era, I will provide you with some of the technology I brought back with me from the 25th century. This includes highly advanced weaponry and scanning equipment far beyond the level of what your contemporary devices can achieve.

History does not record who invented these devices, or when… so their “inventor” may as well be you, dear friend. As the person responsible for bringing these (to your people) advanced and wholly new technologies to market, you stand to reap benefits beyond your wildest imaginings.

In exchange for your small payment, history shall record that you helped me in my quest to save the human race from its oppressors. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain—not only for yourself, but for untold generations of men and women yet to be born.

I await your response with the greatest of anticipation. I know that you will help me.

Don't stop believing

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:26:38 +1200

Things I stopped believing in, and how old I was when I stopped believing in them:

Parental infallibility: 5
It became obvious relatively early on that my parents were just making shit up as they went.

Tooth fairy, Easter bunny: 7
I milked both of them for an extra year, though. Money for nothin’ and chocolate for free.

Santa Claus: 8
Likewise, I professed belief for another year to ride the wave of Christmas presents.

God (Judeo-Christian): 20
In retrospect, I probably never fully bought into the idea of an all-powerful, omniscient being in white-haired, bearded human form. Reading The Boomer Bible, a satirical work written in biblical book/chapter/verse format, and dealing with some truly alienating nonsense in the US military combined to drive out any last vestiges of belief in a benevolent, caring, patriarchal Creator.

“The American Dream”: 20
I grew up wanting for nothing until I was 10, then spent the next eight years in poverty. After two years living on my own, it became obvious that “work hard and success will inevitably follow” was an insidious myth. The divide between the wealthy few and the impoverished masses has, of course, only gotten worse in the past 15 years, to the point that any American who still buys into the traditional notion of “hard work + determination = millionaire” seems either hopelessly optimistic or intellectually feeble.

American Exceptionalism: 24
The political climate in the months following 9/11 drove away any belief I may have still held that America was the world’s shining beacon of hope and freedom. In particular, seeing how people reacted to Muslims in those early days was very telling. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, so I was well aware of the fact that Muslims Are People, Too. Suggestions that we should turn the entire Middle East into a “glass parking lot” thus made me feel like a stranger in my own country. This feeling would only get stronger over time, to the point that I felt it necessary to leave the States and build a new life elsewhere.

“The One”: 24
Once upon a time, traditional romanticism and the brainwashing influence of Hollywood had me convinced that every person has that One other person they’re destined to be with. My real-life interactions with women cured me of that notion.

Spirituality/mysticism of any kind: 28
Watching Penn and Teller’s Bullshit burned out any remaining belief in the paranormal I still possessed. Real life is weird enough without adding an extra layer of superstitious bullshit on top of it.

True love: 35
I used to believe in true love, until the day when, without any prior warning, my wife of seven years announced she was leaving me essentially because she was bored with me. I stubbornly held on to the notion that I could find “true love” with someone else… until my first attempt to do so ended up causing me even more pain than my ex-wife did. Now, I don’t know if I even want another woman in my life. There are very real benefits, there’s no denying that, but in the end all “true love” has ever brought me is misery beyond imagination. For now, I think I’m better off alone… at least I know for certain I can count on myself. It’s the rest of you who cause problems.

Sideways thinking

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:24:34 +1300

After my epic motorcycle crash in November 2012, I sent my bike back up north to Mt Manganui, to the dealership I’d bought it from, so they could repair the damage done to it. For the most part, the damage was cosmetic; most of the fairings on the left side were destroyed, as were the turn signals, headlight, front mudguards, clutch lever, and left mirror. They fixed or replaced everything to the tune of NZ$3500 in parts and labour.

This morning I woke at 5:30 am, significantly earlier than I normally get up and a positively Satanic hour to be awake on a Saturday morning. I left Palmerston North around 7:30 and headed south toward Wellington, because my bike was due for its 500–1200 kilometre “running in” checkup.

I’ve been steadily “training up” for the ride I faced today. I’ve struck out in every direction from Palmerston North over the past month and a half, riding the highways for increasing lengths of time, acclimating myself to the sensation of travelling unprotected at speeds my brain tells me are wrong, wrong, NO YOU WILL DIE WHAT ARE YOU DOING AAAAHHH—

Nothing can prepare you for the sensation of riding a motorcycle on the highway at 100 kph or faster. You may have taken your car out on the highway at speeds in excess of 200 kph—I have—but you’re in a cocoon of steel, safely isolated from any true sense of how much faster you’re travelling than your brain was actually designed to cope with. Now get on a motorcycle, where there’s nothing between you and the road except for physics and skill. Suddenly 100 kph seems deadly. It seems deadly because it is. If you fuck up, you’re salsa.

All this is to say that the ride to Wellington was largely uneventful, but only because I’d trained up for it.

Turns out the repairs they did up north didn’t quite hold for one of my bike’s components. There’s a “beak” of sorts on the front of my bike, a sort of secondary fender that’s probably only there for aerodynamic reasons. It’s connected to a secondary mudguard that shields the radiator from whatever the front tyre throws at it. This was one of many plastic components that got fucked up in my wreck last year, but unlike most of the other parts, for some reason they chose to repair this one rather than replace it. They did a “plastic weld” on the part, which essentially amounts to melting the plastic and rebounding it. Works fine for metal, but it turns out plastic doesn’t hold up as well; the weld had cracked, and there was perhaps a centimetre of plastic still bonded and holding the “beak” on. If the service checker hadn’t found this out, the part likely would have fallen off my bike on the drive back home… and who knows what would have happened if it had. I might very well have wrecked again.

They didn’t have a used or new replacement part in stock, so they offered to just take the “beak” off and have it sent back up north for repairs. I had a better idea.

“You’ve got the same bike on the showroom,” I said. “Couldn’t you just grab the part off of it?”

“Yeah,” the service guy admitted, “but then the showroom bike isn’t in a saleable condition for two weeks.” He shrugged.

But I wasn’t done yet. “How about the Sertão, though?” I asked. “You’ve got three of those.”

The BMW G650GS Sertāo is essentially a suped-up offroad version of the standard G650GS. They share a common engine, frame, and most of the auxiliary parts are the same or similar. And while they only had one standard G650GS sitting in the showroom, they had THREE of the Sertāos… and I knew full well there was no chance they’d sell all three in the two weeks it’d take to get a replacement part.

Turns out I was right. The Sertāo part was a perfect substitute for the broken part on my motorcycle. In fact, it’s a superior substitute, because it’s metal-reinforced at the junction where my old part cracked. Not only that, for some reason the improved Sertāo part cost $60 less than the standard G650GS part. A win all around.

I spent four hours on the back of my motorcycle today. It’s had its running-in check, so I can now safely take its RPMs over 5000. I’ve already taken advantage of that; I’m now well aware of how nimbly my bike can pass slower traffic when necessary. Let’s just say I can go from 50–100 kph faster than I can say it.

This is definitely the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had, and I have ample physical evidence of the fact that this is the first hobby I’ve had that could easily kill me. I don’t care. It’s awesome. Driving a car doesn’t remotely compare. I drove to Wellington and back on Thursday in my car; as recently as a month ago, it would have been an entertaining drive. This time, it was boring as hell. I kept finding I’d crept over 120 kph, because the sensation of speed just wasn’t there at all.

At the same time, I feel like I’m a safer driver now than I ever have been. Being on what’s essentially a bicycle with delusions of grandeur hurtling down asphalt at speeds that would reduce your skeleton to jelly if you crashed into something definitely trains you to look out for hazards with hyper vigilance. I find that cross-pollinates to when I’m driving a car; I’m now much more fully aware of my surroundings, because I still have that “everything else on the road is out to murder me” paranoia going for me.

I’d almost go so far as to argue that everyone who’s physically and mentally capable of doing so should learn to ride a motorcycle if they regularly drive a car.

Murder on two wheels, resurrection on two legs

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 23:39:43 +1300

Motorcycle: A mechanical contrivance designed to murder the uncoordinated, inattentive, reckless, and/or stupid.

On 22 November, my BMW G650GS arrived in the driveway. I’d been waiting for it for nearly a month. $14,000 worth of motorcycle arrived at last, brand new and gleaming in the summer sun. Not a scratch on it, and less than five kilometres on the odometer.

When I turned the key, opened the throttle, and pressed the ignition switch for the first time, the bike roared into life with a sound like something out of legend.

Less than 24 hours later, this happened:

I was coming through a roundabout in the southwest corner of The Square in Palmerston North, just outside the Manawatu Standard. At the apex of the roundabout, I accelerated out of the turn, just as I’d been trained to do in my October sessions at the Honda dealership up on the north side of town.

But my grip on the throttle was too far forward, and my gloves were pre-formed into a tight grip, and I just plain didn’t know what the hell I was doing at that point…

…so the throttle wound up all the way open.

What came next happened faster than you can read it. I was in first gear, so with the throttle all the way open the bike rocketed from roughly 10 kph to around 50 in about a second. Unprepared for the abrupt acceleration, I did the last thing I should have done: I held on for dear life. With the throttle still wide open.

The bike sideswiped a safety pole, which threw its centre of gravity off. It jumped the kerb—by this time I must have been doing 60, maybe 70, because the throttle was still all the way open—and I found myself on the footpath.

Eventually the bike flipped onto its left side, with me still on it. My left shoulder bore the brunt of the fall, and the impact broke six of my ribs. The bike dragged me along the pavement for a couple metres before it slid from underneath me. When it did, I went into a tumble; my knuckles, knees, and helmet’s faceplate dragged along the asphalt in the brief seconds before I rolled to a halt, spread-eagled on my back. The bike slid along the footpath for another ten metres or so before friction brought it to a halt.

In addition to six broken ribs, I would later discover that virtually all of the skin on both of my knees was gone, and the knuckles on my right hand were swollen so badly the doctors suspected a fracture (turns out I just ruptured a joint capsule).

It could have been a lot worse. For one thing, if I hadn’t been wearing a full-face helmet, I probably wouldn’t have a face to speak of anymore. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet at all, forget it, I’d be dead. My unarmoured leather jacket didn’t mitigate the impact much, but it at least stopped my arms and torso from becoming road salsa. My jeans did absolutely nothing to protect me.

My first reaction once my consciousness caught up with real-time events was to bellow “NOOOO!” inside my helmet as I lay on the asphalt. I don’t know exactly what I was railing against. Probably the overall situation. It was just so fucking embarrassing. Such an obvious, epic failure, and right outside the city’s newspaper offices to boot.

I lay motionless on the pavement, on my back, knowing full well I might have a neck, spine, or head injury and not wanting to aggravate matters. The first person on the scene was an extremely attractive woman who urged me not to move. No problem there, I thought. Naturally, in my disoriented and idiotic state, all I wanted to know was whether or not my bike was okay.

Paramedics showed up and determined I wasn’t paralysed, so they invited me to try to stand up. My first attempt didn’t go so well. I didn’t know about the broken ribs yet; that wouldn’t become clear until hours later at the ER, after an X-ray. I just assumed I’d bruised the shit out of my latissimus dorsi muscle on that side. My second attempt to stand was successful, and at last I was able to survey the damage done to my brand-new bike.

All of the plastic fairings on the left side of the bike had been essentially annihilated, along with the headlight, turn signals, mirror, and clutch lever. But as far as I could tell, there was no actual mechanical damage. It seemed salvageable, but I knew it was going to be an expensive prospect.

Paramedics drew me into the ambulance and took my vital signs. They auscultated my chest for breath sounds with a stethoscope and heard nothing abnormal. Later I would find this grimly hilarious, as they’d held the stethoscope directly over the area where six of my ribs were floating around, free-spirited within my thorax.

They didn’t find anything obviously wrong with me, so I had a friend of mine pick me up and drive me home. My bike arrived on a tow truck moments later, and the truckie hauled its brutalised remains into the garage for me.

I wandered through the house, doing circles through my lounge and kitchen, shirtless and in shock. Also in pain. Searing pain. I bent over the sink and tried to stretch out what I assumed was merely traumatised muscles. It didn’t help. When I started seeing sparkles at the edge of my vision, I knew it was time to head for the ER.

I called the same friend who’d dropped me off at home and had him deliver me to the ER. Knowing full well they’d want to take X-rays, and remembering the agony of removing my shirt the first time, I showed up at the hospital in my bathrobe and a pair of swim trunks. That’s it.

Hours later, after the X-ray showed six of my ribs had been broken, I was told I’d be kept at the ER overnight. I’d brought my iPhone and its charger (where was that forward-thinking preparation hours earlier while you were on the back of the bike, you dipshit?), so I was able to keep in touch with friends, family, and my sorta/kinda girlfriend/whatever (about whom the less is said the better; unlike my ribs and knees, that wound is far from fully healed).

At this point, just over a day after I’d ridden my brand-new motorcycle for the first time, as I lay battered and bruised in the hospital’s overnight ward I contemplated whether this new hobby of mine was such a good idea after all.

Rarely does real life provide such clear-cut cases of metaphorical parallelism. It happens all the time in literature; professors and critics usually say a novel is never really about what you think it is, but rather the hidden (often intentionally obfuscated) meaning lurking beneath the words. So Moby Dick becomes less a story about a crazy ship captain hunting a whale and more a stand-in for obsession in general and how revenge destroys the soul. That kind of thing.

Like I said, real life almost never works that way. But it did this time.

Less than three months before my motorcycle tried to destroy my body, my wife tried to destroy my soul. With no prior indication that anything was wrong, she abruptly announced that she was leaving me. In the space of a single afternoon, eleven years of friendship, ten years of love, and seven years of marriage boiled away into nothing.

I could have let that destroy me. I could have let it beat me. I could have let it reduce me to a shell of a human being. I could have sworn off women forever and/or become a raging misogynistic shithead, and few people would have blamed me.

Instead, I decided very early on—and I’m talking within hours of her leaving—that I wasn’t going to be destroyed, or defeated, or diminished. This isn’t meant to understate the very real and profound pain I went through; I wouldn’t wish those first two months on my worst enemy. But I was determined that time wasn’t going to be the main factor deciding whether I was healed over it or not. I would control my destiny, not the calendar.

I took control of the aspects of my life that I could control, some of which I’d long neglected while servicing someone else’s needs and ignoring my own, and set about improving them as much as I was able. I identified the parts of my life that were out of my control, most of them relating to my former partner, and I essentially crumpled them up and tossed them over my shoulder. “When life gives you lemons, I say fuck the lemons and bail.”

It’s an approach that’s served me well. It’s been less than half a year since she left, and already it’s all but impossible for me to imagine a life with her in it. I am so much better off now than I was before, and I like the person I am today so much more than the person I was when I was with her. I might not have believed it if you’d told me all this in early September, but it’s the truth: her leaving me is the best thing that’s happened to me in years, because for the first time in a decade, my life belongs to me and me alone.

Now we come back to the murder machine, the BMW that gave me my most profound lesson yet in how ridiculously fragile this vehicle of meat and gristle I inhabit truly is.

I could have let that one crash rule me. I could have let it beat me. I could have let the fear own me. I could have sworn off motorcycling forever and sold off anything associated with it, and few people would have blamed me.

Instead, I sent the bike north to get it fixed. Parts from Germany boarded a slow boat to New Zealand while the broken parts of my body knitted themselves back together cell by painful cell. And after two months, my bike arrived in the driveway of my new house. Both of us bear scars of the accident in November, but we are both essentially healed.

The first time I got back on the bike was utterly terrifying. For the first five minutes I didn’t see the road in front of me; I saw the accident, over and over again. I couldn’t coax the bike above 30 kph. Eventually, after 20 minutes, I convinced myself to do the speed limit (50).

I’ve since taken the bike out on the highway, reaching speeds of up to 110 kph. It’s completely, pants-shitting horrifying going that fast, knowing the whole while that a split second of inattention, or a random patch of oil, or some asshole car driver pulling out in front of me is all it’ll take to send me hurtling through the air again, maybe for the last time before the Big Dark.

And yet at the same time, what a fucking rush it is to go from zero to 100 kph in a matter of seconds, with no walls to block my view of the world around me and somehow also make the speed seem more “acceptable” to the primitive, instinctually mammal portion of my brain. I know damn well that it’s an incredibly dangerous thing to do, riding a motorcycle… possibly the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I love it. I wouldn’t give it up for anyone.

Life has thrown all kinds of shit at me, especially in the past year. If life is a game, I feel like I’ve been playing it on Hard Mode lately, and I’m seriously questioning where the fuck I can find some cheat codes (extra lives, infinite money, and +100 to my “relationship” stats would be a good start). Yet despite all that, and all I’ve been through, I keep going.

I’m a stubborn motherfucker, always have been, but this is less about stubbornness and more about not wanting to miss what life has to offer. I could have hung up my helmet and never ridden a motorcycle again, but oh what great times I’d have missed out on. And by that same token, I could have let my ex-wife’s abrupt departure reduce me to a puddle of self-destruction and misery, but what good would that have done me?

“It takes time,” people say, and those who don’t know me well, who don’t know how incredibly resolute and resilient I am, always express surprise at how far along “the process” I am already, but that surprise isn’t warranted. I’ve got sixty, maybe seventy years left to live. Tops. And that’s it. It’s all I’ve got. I’m not going to spend it wallowing in self-pity or moaning about what might have been. And I’m not going to let cataclysm or pain stop me from living the life I want to live… or being the person I want to be. The second I do that, the instant I do give in, I might as well just pull the plug, because that’s the same as being dead in my books.

Short version: vroom, bitches. Vroom.

Under a billion suns

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:07:49 +1300

I pull into my driveway just after 10 pm. Gravel crunches beneath my feet as I walk toward my front door. In my backyard, silhouettes of trees rise against a spray of stars. That bright trail of far-flung suns draws my eyes farther skyward, straight up, and I want a better view.

On a whim, I pack my dog into the car and drive to the river track. I’ve never been here at night, though I’ve always wanted to come and stargaze here, a little farther from the city lights. Technically I’m not supposed to be at this park after sunset, but I know the cops will have other things occupying their time tonight, downtown on a Saturday night, and enforcing arcane rules about when you can and can’t access a public walkway will be far down their list.

My dog and I walk the path, the same one we tread almost every day under the full blast of the New Zealand sun. This time, we are both shrouded in deep darkness. My dog is black, so I can’t even see her until my eyes adjust; all I hear is her excited panting and the tick of her nails against asphalt as she runs by.

As we walk through this depopulated and blackened landscape, it occurs to me this is something I never would have done in the States. It would be like waving your arms in Death’s face and daring it to do something. Forget the very real risk of some random fellow wanderer doing you an unkindness; in the places I’ve lived, there’d be an equal if not greater chance of some mammalian horror emerging from the bushes and making a meal out of you.

Here, in the South Pacific, there are no fellow wanderers, and the only mammalian horror in this entire park (other than myself) trots panting alongside me.

Above, the Milky Way sprawls from horizon to horizon. I’m maybe two kilometres away from the downtown centre of a city of 80,000 people, yet I can see things in the sky that even rural dwellers in the States would gawk at (assuming they could be pried away from their televisions long enough to care). I smell only grass, I hear only the nearby Manawatū River, and I see only the Universe wheeling overhead. I know enough about astronomy to find my way across the sky; there’s Orion, there’s Sirius, hello Canopus. That bright star, the one that doesn’t twinkle, is actually Jupiter.

I find the galactic centre easily, not far from Alpha Centauri. Farther overhead and slightly northwest are the Magellenic Clouds, hazy and undefined this close to the city’s light pollution, but still visible.

It’s said that no one had any idea what the Milky Way actually was until Galileo pointed a telescope at it and found stars beyond counting. But that was in the Northern Hemisphere; the Southern Hemisphere points more or less toward the galactic centre (our Solar System’s ecliptic is, hilariously, tilted about 90 degrees relative to the galactic plane), and the Milky Way stands out far more brilliantly as a result. It seems obtuse to look at this trail of stars and see it as anything but what it is, but of course I benefit from centuries of scientific hindsight.

I don’t know what other people are doing with their Saturday night—I can make an educated guess—but I’m the only one standing here under a billion suns. The experience is supposed to be a humbling one; I’m supposed to feel small, infinitesimal beneath the gaze of a galaxy I will never, ever leave.

Instead, all I feel is gratitude that I’m able to see it at all, mixed with a small dose of pride that I even bothered to look.

"Things will get better"

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:25:08 +1300

September 2012: On an oddly warm early spring afternoon, my wife left me without warning and without any prior indication that anything was wrong. I went from happily married (I thought) to alone and devastated in a single afternoon.

“Don’t worry,” my friends and family said. “Things will get better.”

November 2012: I wrecked a brand-new $14,000 motorcycle the day after I got it. I got to ride the thing exactly twice before it got FUBAR. I got FUBAR, too; I broke six ribs and skinned the shit out of my knees. (I’m almost completely healed, but nearly two months later, the bike still isn’t fixed.)

“Don’t worry,” my friends and family said. “Things will get better.”

December 2012: After a whirlwind affair, a woman I’d quickly begun to care for, with great intensity, suddenly and inexplicably decided to end things. I was even more devastated by this than when my wife left. I tried to be friends with her, found I couldn’t handle it, then cut off all contact with her. I still miss her terribly.

“Don’t worry,” my friends and family said. “Things will get better.”

January 2013: My application for New Zealand residency gets lodged, but Immigration says it’ll take 9–12 months to process. My existing visa ends at the end of March. My employer can’t navigate its own bureaucracy quickly enough to get me a permanent contract before my existing visa expires, which means that unless I can find alternative employment or get an alternate visa, I face a very real possibility of having to sell almost everything I own and move back to the USA—75 days from today.

Getting a temporary work visa depends on my employer being able to convince Immigration that they absolutely need me to finish out the remainder of my contract… which ends in September, with no guarantees that I’ll be able to keep working there beyond then. So right now, the best I can hope for is a work visa that lasts until September, hopefully giving me enough time to find a job that will hire me on permanently so I can stay in this country. The alternative: sell pretty much everything except the clothes off my back and my pets, then go live with my mom in East Jesus Nowhere, Washington State until I can figure out how to cobble together the pieces of my shattered existence.

“Don’t worry,” my friends and family say. “Things will get better.”

You know what? I wish you guys would stop saying that. Every time you do, things get worse.

The James Bond CliffsNotes

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:28:02 +1300

Most people know the main tropes of the James Bond series:

“Bond. James Bond.”
“Shaken, not stirred.”
“Oh, James!”

In other words, suave, sophisticated dude travels the world’s exotic locales, battling evil and killing dudes when he’s not busy seducing women, boozing, or gambling. Occasionally he uses gadgets of varying degrees of ridiculousness to assist him in his quest.

Deeper familiarity with the series is a serious time commitment. With 23 two-hour films spread over more than half a century, that’s a serious chunk of cinema to consume. I know, because I’ve spent the past few weeks going through the entire series in chronological order, from Dr No all the way to Casino Royale (I’ll re-watch Quantum of Solace tomorrow, and I’ll likely go see Skyfall in the theatre again just for the hell of it).

Because it’s such a huge time commitment—and because so many of the Roger Moore-era films just flat out suck—I’ve prepared a (sarcastic) CliffsNotes quick reference to each film. In many cases, particularly with the 1970s films, you really won’t be missing much beyond what I’ve written here.

Spoilers abound, obviously (for decades-old films, anyhow).

Dr No

Sean Connery seduces every eligible female in the Caribbean. The eponymous villain is defeated by the scriptwriters’ unfamiliarity with nuclear power plant safety protocols.

From Russia with Love

Sean Connery has a Russian stalker. He’s strangely fine with it, probably because she’s super hot. When he’s not busy killing dudes, they bang.

Goldfinger

An adult version of Eric Cartman tries to irradiate Fort Knox, because GOLD. Sean Connery stops him by successfully “Oh James“-ing his top pilot.

Thunderball

Watch in wonder as Sean Connery scuba dives against the forces of evil. For an hour and a half.

You Only Live Twice

Sean Connery is turning Japanese, I really think so. Meanwhile, you finally discover what the Austin Powers films were making fun of.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Who the hell is this guy? That’s not Sean Connery. Also, Kojak is the bad guy now? George La-Z-Boy defeats him through the power of Winter Olympics sports.

Diamonds Are Forever

Sean Connery goes to Vegas. Hijinks ensue. Kojak is a British guy with hair now, and he plans to use GDI’s orbiting ion cannon to destroy the world’s supply of tiberium. Or something like that.

Live and Let Die

Roger Moore is on the scene. Hey, blaxploitation films are popular in this film’s era, right? Let’s copy them! Shamelessly! Meanwhile, some racist hillbilly guy provides the franchise with its equivalent of Jar Jar Binks.

The Man with the Golden Gun

Roger Moore battles Saruman for possession of the One Gun. Racist hillbilly guy returns, for some reason apparent only to the film’s director. Tattoo from Fantasy Island guest stars. No, I am not kidding.

The Spy Who Loved Me

Gaze in wonder upon a Roger Moore film that doesn’t completely suck, because they suddenly remembered that James Bond is a spy. By the way, even though he dresses and acts like him, the villain totally isn’t Ernst Stavro Blofeld, because lawsuits.

Moonraker

Star Wars sure made a bunch of money. Let’s go to space! Lasers! Wheeee! The Space Shuttle guest stars.

For Your Eyes Only

Roger Moore skis and mountain climbs the villains to death. He also bores the audience to death.

Octopussy

LOL, we said “pussy”. Ahem. Roger Moore goes to India, then subsequently saves the world by becoming an East German circus clown. Not kidding. Wish I was.

A View to a Kill

A visibly ancient Roger Moore attempts to prevent Christopher Walken from stealing the world’s supply of cowbells. Or something. Roger also sleeps with Grace Jones at one point, and that is the very definition of “close your eyes and think of England”.

The Living Daylights

Heave a relieved sigh as Timothy Dalton replaces Roger Moore and suddenly brings a modicum of legitimacy and gravitas to the role. Then, squirm uncomfortably as Afghanistan’s Mujahideen are portrayed as the good guys. Ah, the 1980s.

Licence to Kill

Films about rogue law enforcement agents seeking revenge against drug lords are popular, right? Let’s make one of those, too. Timothy Dalton here, reminding you that winners don’t use drugs. Except alcohol… shaken, not stirred. *wink*

GoldenEye

Remington Steele battles against Boromir and Jean Grey to prevent them from using GDI’s orbiting ion cannon (making a return appearance after a 25-year hiatus). The Soviet Union and BMW make cameo appearances.

Tomorrow Never Dies

It’s Remington Steele versus Rupert Murdoch and Richard Stallman this time. Michelle Yao provides backup assistance, and the two warriors prevent World War III through the power of choreographed motorcycle Gun-Fu. BMW guest stars.

The World is Not Enough

Remington Steele fights the hot French chick from Braveheart in order to prevent her from overcooking Turkey. Denise Richards guest stars as the most implausible nuclear physicist in history, while BMW returns as James Bond’s sidekick.

Die Another Day

Remington Steele and Storm from the X-Men team up to defeat the entire nation of North Korea, with assistance from a Romulan cloaking device stapled to an Aston Martin. GDI’s ion cannon returns, angrier than ever and out for revenge.

Casino Royale

Daniel Craig AKA James Blond is on the scene, and he’s really super mean now. He will totally parkour your ass to death without blinking, unless he’s too busy beating you at Texas Hold ‘Em. But he’s also Vulnerable Bond; he falls deeply in love with some woman, only to be utterly betrayed. Don’t let it get you down, 007… we’ve all been there.

Quantum of Solace

James Blond has his licence to kill revoked, which just makes him angrier and makes him kill even more folks. I mean, did Judi Dench even watch Licence to Kill? This time, in retaliation he parkours the entire nation of Bolivia in the face so hard it turns into a desert.

Skyfall

James Blond seeks revenge for some guy blowing up MI6. He manages to kill all the bad guys, but at what cost… Judi Dench leaves the franchise the hard way, and Voldemort becomes the new M.

Just so we’re clear, Connery is the best Bond. Full stop. Craig is a close second though. Dalton and Brosnan are tied for third. Lazenby is in fifth. Roger Moore… man, I’m sure he’s a nice guy in real life, but I just could not enjoy that era of Bond films at all.

If you can’t commit the time to watching the entire series (and I don’t blame you), then here’s my advice for getting the Best of Bond. Watch the first five Connery films, GoldenEye, and the Daniel Craig films. Leave everything else behind unless you’re a fan of really campy films.

How I spent my summer vacation (in an alternate universe)

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 08:37:50 +1300

Today is the final day of my summer holiday that started the evening of 21 December. I could go on about what I actually did, but I thought it would be more fun to check in on alternate universe versions of myself and see how they made out over these past 16 days.

Earth 42: The morning of December 21, I got on my motorcycle and drove to the inter-island ferry in Wellington. I spent the next two weeks doing a slow, leisurely circuit of the South Island. Highlights of the trip: the ride itself was probably the best part. The South Island feels like it was made for motorcycles. I finally stopped over in Queenstown for the first time and went skydiving on Christmas morning. Spent New Year’s at Hamner Springs and made out with some German girl I met there. I’m a bit sore from two weeks on the back of my bike, but it was so worth it.

Earth 91: My girlfriend and I hung out together in Wellington for the first week. I spent Christmas with her and her family; that was a bit awkward at first, but they seemed to like me well enough, so overall it went well. She and I drove up to my place in Palmy on Boxing Day, and I got to show her around the place properly this time since I wasn’t suffering from the effects of a motorcycle crash. We spent New Year’s in Napier… let’s just say that was a great end to 2012, and the year ahead looks even better.

Earth 116: No response. This version of me died in a motorcycle crash on 23 November.

Earth 244: Indecipherable Anglo-Russian mishmash. He didn’t sound very happy.

Earth 387: In the depths of this, the 28th winter since the bombs fell, life is the usual struggle for basic survival. Most of our crops died from overexposure to UV, and we had to use up most of our ammunition stores defending what little survived. Little Joseph wandered off into a hot zone… we buried him next to his brothers and sisters. My wife and I have only Kyle and Denise remaining, and Denise’s chronic coughing worries me. I don’t have enough supplies in trade to visit the doctor in New Seattle, so hopefully she pulls through on her own.

Earth 400: All I got was reptilian hissing.

So how did I spend my summer vacation here, on Earth 77? The first day, I went to Wellington and bought a crapload of motorcycle clothing even though my bike is STILL in the shop after my wreck in November. I also went on a date with an extremely attractive and incredibly intelligent American veterinarian, but she didn’t seem all that into me, and I haven’t heard from her in almost two weeks. So it goes.

I spent the overwhelming majority of the rest of my break alone at home, split between watching James Bond movies, reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and getting drunk. I spent Christmas alone. When it looked like I would be spending New Year’s alone too, I said “Fuck that,” hopped in my car, and took myself and my dog up to Auckland for a couple of days to visit some friends up there. After returning to Palmy, absolutely nothing noteworthy happened. I go back to work tomorrow with few tales worth telling. Snoozefest.

Overall, I am well aware that I am not living in the best of all possible universes. But I also know it could be worse. At least I’m not on Earth 546; that poor bastard and his wife spent two weeks in Vegas with his mother-in-law. I’ll take Earth 77 over that any day.

2012 in review

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:24:41 +1300

Being a social media whore makes it a whole lot easier to do these end-of-the-year review things, where I look back over the previous 12 months and try to figure out what the hell happened. For the past several years I haven’t had much to say; 2009 through 2011 was pretty uneventful from my perspective, with neither major setbacks or noteworthy accomplishments. In fact, I spent most of those years simply marking time until the end of 2012, when (so I thought) the next chapter of my life would begin upon my wife’s completion of vet school.

Turns out the next chapter of my life started a bit earlier than that, and in a way I couldn’t possibly have predicted even a week before.

Prior to September, I felt like literally the only noteworthy thing that happened in all of 2012 was my getting a job (finally), and in the weirdest way possible. In February, my very first New Zealand-based Twitter follower put out a call for writers seeking work. A month later he was my supervisor at my new job, where I’m earning a salary that, at first glance, I thought surely must have been a typo.

For the next six months, my life was pretty uneventful. I’d go to work, do my job, come home, unwind, then sleep. Just like billions of other people. Nothing to write home about. My wife was gone more than she was home, but I was used to that. Even when she was home, she wasn’t really there; between vet school and roller derby, she was usually too exhausted to do anything other than muck about on Facebook while reality shows blared from the TV.

In July, she left for a two-month overseas jaunt to Canada, the States, and the UK for her veterinary studies. I spent those two months in artificial bachelorhood, never in the least suspecting that I was in training for the real thing.

She returned to NZ in the final week of August, and we spent a week together on Waiheke Island. No indication from her that anything was wrong.

On 2 September, my wife of seven years abruptly told me that she felt we should go our separate ways. She wanted to be a veterinary neurologist more than anything, and she felt she could only do that by moving back to the States, something I’d insisted I didn’t want to do under any circumstances. We’d had this argument before, and I’d refused to budge—New Zealand is home, and I’d just started this new job, so uprooting everything and starting all over again didn’t make sense—but now that it looked like she was on the verge of leaving me, I did what I felt was necessary to salvage things, ready to sacrifice everything else that gave my life meaning right to the very end if it meant I could keep her in my life. I told her I’d go with her back to the States. I’d hate every second of it, but as I told her, “I love New Zealand, but I love you more.”

Oh, you poor bastard. Because the next thing she said sealed the deal, forever: “I’m not attracted to you anymore, and I haven’t been for a long time.”

She walked out the door hours later, and that was that. The end of an 11–year friendship, a 10–year relationship, a 7–year marriage. All of it gone, evaporated in a single afternoon. Out of nowhere. And for the dumbest reasons I’ve ever heard.

Most people, having that situation thrust upon them, would very likely be broken by it. Irretrievably and irrevocably destroyed. Not me. Don’t get me wrong, I was emotionally devastated, but within hours of her leaving I did what I always do in severely fraught situations: I sat down and analysed things from the most rational perspective possible. And in the final analysis, only a few hours after she was out of the door and out of my life, I realised something that might have taken most people months (if not years) to learn: I didn’t really lose anything that day that I hadn’t already lost, and I was better off without her.

When we first moved to New Zealand, I knew vet school was going to be a huge drain on my wife’s time and energy. And even though we’d spent most of the years before moving here almost constantly in one another’s company, I was willing to sacrifice that if it meant she succeeded in vet school. I looked at it as an investment in our future, so although I knew I was going to be essentially on my own for close to five years, I also knew it was a temporary situation that would pay off in the end.

And we still found time for one another for those first few years. On average, we’d hang out together about every other weekend. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing… which is eventually what I ended up with once she got into roller derby.

It may sound like melodrama or hyperbole, but in a very real sense I think roller derby killed my marriage. She got so into it and so obsessed by it that she had no time, energy, or attention left over for me. For close to two years any time she wasn’t spending studying for vet school she was spending obsessing over roller derby—an obsession I didn’t share, and one I wanted no part of. I simply wasn’t interested in it at all, and I resented the time she spent engaged in a hobby that was taking away the last sliver of time we used to spend together.

So although seeing her walk out that door for the final time was a smack in the face emotionally, in reality she was gone the second she strapped on a pair of skates. I’d been mostly on my own since mid–2008 and almost entirely on my own for most of 2010 through 2012, so not having her in my life at all was merely the next logical progression in a long downward spiral.

I got over her much more quickly than I anticipated. All through September and October, I deliberately set out to fix and/or improve long-neglected aspects of my life, to control the things I could control and say “fuck it” to the things I couldn’t. By mid–October I felt like I was healed enough to start looking for someone else—not in the sense of “Let’s find a new girlfriend,” but more in the sense of “Let’s just see what’s out there.”

1 November rolls around, the day my ex was supposed to turn the car over to me by prior agreement, but for some inadequately explained reason she decided to cause all sorts of unnecessary drama and refused to turn it over as agreed. So I showed up on her doorstep and made a simple demand: “It’s November 1. Keys and title.”

For those first two months, I’d dreaded seeing her again. My town isn’t all that big, so there was a very good chance I’d have randomly run into her while I was out and about. If I did see her, I wondered how I would react. Would I break down? Flip her the bird? Start shouting obscenities? I didn’t know. I never found out, because we never crossed paths until she refused to turn the car over.

There she was, standing in front of me in the flesh for the first time in two months, and I felt… nothing. Not a thing. Not sadness, not regret, not love, nothing. I was pissed off because of the immediate situation—she was being an unnecessary obstacle and a pain in the ass about the car—but as for the overall situation, I didn’t feel a single twinge of emotion. That was the last thing I expected, but feeling nothing felt so very good.

The drama didn’t stop when I left her doorstep (only after forcing her to back down on the matter of the car); she called the cops and claimed I was threatening her. When they showed up on my doorstep, I was honestly relieved that it was just the cops, because for a split second, when I saw two big dudes on my porch, I thought she’d sent over some of her hood rat roller derby pals to whup my ass. The cops told me her side of the story, and it took every ounce of self control I had not to laugh my ass off. Once I told them what actually happened, they honestly seemed bored by the whole thing, and they left.

That was the last direct interaction I ever had with her. The End.

All that nonsense was bad enough on its own, but not enough to push 2012 into Worst Year Ever territory. Unfortunately, 2012 had more surprises up its fucking sleeve.

I joined a local dating site in mid–October. The second week of November a woman messaged me out of the blue. I liked her on first sight, so I messaged her back. We started off very lighthearted, just joking back and forth, but the more we talked the more we found we had in common. Things escalated between us extraordinarily quickly.

Weeks earlier I’d sat down and written up a checklist of what I wanted in a potential partner. Physical traits were easy; all I’m really looking for is a basic (though admittedly pretty high) threshold of attractiveness and an at least moderately athletic physique. Things like hair colour, eye colour, and ethnicity simply don’t matter to me. It’s when I started writing down what I wanted in terms of personality that things got very lengthy. I was only halfway through with the list after an hour, but after reviewing what I’d written to that point I was able to delete everything and summarise what I wanted succinctly: “Female version of me.”

That’s almost exactly what this woman was, and it’s likely a big part of why we hit it off so well. Never in life had I felt so quickly or completely compatible with someone. I suppose that should have been a warning sign, but at the time all I felt was hope and a big old case of the Likes. Unlike virtually every other time a situation like this has arisen, I had ample proof that she felt the same way… nothing unrequited or unreturned here, for once. Both of us agreed that if we hit it off in person as well as we had online, there was no limit to where things could go.

Things certainly were looking up toward the end of November, which of course meant it was time for me to get smacked right back down. First I wrecked my brand-new motorcycle less than 24 hours after it showed up in my driveway, causing nearly $3500 in damage to it while I was on my way to the insurance company. I also broke six ribs at once—the first time in my life I’d broken any bones at all—and spent the night in the emergency room.

My new friend offered to take care of me over that weekend, and after some initial reluctance I agreed. Even though I was in a severe state of disrepair, I still felt as though we hit it off extremely well over that weekend, and I was on an emotional high that had absolutely nothing to do with the codeine or tramadol.

It didn’t last. Within a week, she dumped me. A week after that, I decided I couldn’t stay in contact with her, even as friends; after everything I’d been through, it hurt too much. Her calling things off made no sense—it still doesn’t—and, strange though it may seem, I felt worse about losing her than I did about losing my wife. At least in the final analysis I felt like I was better off without my wife. I didn’t feel better off without the woman who followed her.

Between the motorcycle wreck and being unceremoniously dumped right as things were looking their brightest, 2012 was officially pushed into the status of Worst Year Ever.

I spent probably the first half of December in a constant state of misery, completely screwed up emotionally over what happened in the last week of November. Prior to meeting this woman, I’d been completely fine with being on my own. I was fully aware and accepting of the fact that I was likely to be alone for as much as a year or more, but I was actually okay with that. After meeting and becoming completely infatuated with this new person, then losing her just as quickly, I knew what I was missing out on… and being alone no longer felt freeing. It felt like a sentence.

I knew the only way to break myself out of that funk would be to find something (or someone) else to expend energy upon. I met another woman online who ticked my Big Three Boxes—Cute as Hell, Devastatingly Intelligent, Not Insane. I went on a date with her, but sadly failed to hit it off with her at all. Although things didn’t and aren’t likely to go anywhere farther, it was at least enough to shake me out of my mopey tree and once again get used to the idea of being on my own. I’ve spent most of my Christmas break alone at home, and while that may sound tragic to some, it’s been truly refreshing to get used to my own company again.

On 29 December, 10 years to the day after my ex and I were officially In a Relationship, I found the divorce papers in my mailbox. Less than an hour and a half later, they were signed, notarised, and in the post back to the States. I didn’t feel the slightest tickle of regret or pain as I signed those papers. Instead, I felt overwhelming relief and a sense of unparalleled freedom.

My ex is 11,000 kilometres away, and the odds of my ever seeing again are comfortably close enough to zero. I might have felt differently a year ago, or even four months ago, but today I am so completely fine with that. I think back over those last two years, and I wonder why I didn’t leave her before she left me. I spent a long time wondering what kind of lesson I was supposed to learn from all that, but it finally came to me a few weeks ago: sacrificing everything for someone else’s happiness sounds good on paper, and in theory it’s what a relationship is “supposed” to involve. In reality, giving everything I have to someone else means nothing is left over for me. It’s a mistake I made yet again in November, but it’s one I have no intention of repeating next year, or in any other year.

Maybe “be a little more selfish” isn’t the best lesson to take away from all this, but I think it’s a necessary one all the same.

At the beginning of 2012, I was married, unemployed, lonely, but relatively happy. At the end of 2012, I am divorced, gainfully employed, lonely… but still relatively happy. Even though the last four months of it were a festival of shit, 2012 failed to break my spirit, and I face 2013 with a modest sense of hope.

I have no idea what my life will be like 365 days from now. Not even the slightest clue. That’s the first time I’ve been able to say that in years, and it feels strangely freeing… like the only limits to what I can do in the next year are the ones I make myself.

As the Stones say, “I’m free to do what I want, any old time.”

The Beach

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:34:16 +1300

It’s raining, but he doesn’t care. It’s time to go to The Beach.

Water falls in great torrents, making his errand seem that much crazier than it might have on a sunny day. His dog briefly stirs in the back seat as he taps the brakes, trying to keep his distance from the lost tourists in front of him. For once, he doesn’t begrudge them for travelling more than 20 kilometres below the speed limit.

Water pools at the sides of the two-lane highway, almost daring him to be reckless. Go on, take this next corner at 90, one puddle whispers. What could possibly go wrong?

He takes the corner at 65 with a grim smile.

Today’s colour palette is decidedly limited—grey above, green below. At the horizon, the two shades blend together and match the washed-out green/grey of his eyes. His dog’s amber eyes stare at him from the rearview mirror; she too is heedless of the rain. Play, she seems to be saying. I get to play!

They arrive at Himatangi. Normally lively during a summer like this, the town shows no activity today. Almost everyone is hiding from the rain. Even Kiwis have limits.

He doesn’t.

He drives onto the beach. “The beach is a road,” one sign among many proclaims. There are new signs here he hasn’t seen before, including several imploring him to stay in certain designated areas if he plans to swim. That’s not on the agenda, and it wouldn’t be even on a fine day.

He drives down an impromptu, half-assed trail sectioned off with driftwood and other detritus from the sea. He parks near the town’s estuary and puts on a grey jacket. Grey jacket, grey car, grey eyes, grey ocean, grey sky. Grey life, if we’re being honest.

He checks his cargo shorts for the cargo they carry. The reason he came here today. He finds it. Nods. Steps out into the rain.

His dog follows him down the beach. Within seconds she finds a stick; her eyes implore him to throw it. For now, he ignores her. For now, he’s too busy smirking at a Jeep stuck in the sand. His own tiny Toyota managed the beach as a road just fine, but the four-wheel drive behemoth in front of him is thoroughly entrenched. He shakes his head and heads south, with the sea ever churning to his right.

Ceaselessly the rain falls. It soaks his hair in seconds. Rivulets stream down his face, gather on his upper lip. He blows the drops away now and then when they become a nuisance. The dog runs in circles at his feet, trying to catch his attention. Throw the stick, human, she begs. Throw it. Throw the stick. THROW THE FUCKING STICK.

He throws the stick, into the waves. She chases it, catches it. Swims back. Lays it at his feet. He throws it again. Repeat.

This goes on at intervals for several kilometres southward along Himatangi Beach. To him, this is the apotheosis of all beaches. Once upon a time and in another life—maybe more like three lives ago—Long Beach in California held the title of the prototypical capital-B Beach. Not anymore. Himatangi reigns unchallenged. Even in New Zealand there are bigger beaches, better beaches—Hahei certainly comes to mind, and a dozen others—but HImatangi, the first Kiwi sand to seep between his toes four and a half years earlier, is his beach.

And at this moment, four kilometres south of the village named for the beach (or is it the other way around?) it is indeed his beach. Aside from his dog and a flock of seagulls fleeing southward before them in a state of constant derision, there’s no sign of life here. The last car he passed was long ago lost to the rain and the mist of distance. He is alone. As intended.

After a guilty glance to make sure he’s alone, he sings for an audience of one—two if you count the dog, but let’s not, since she’s preoccupied with finding a bigger stick. He sings mournfully, almost in a dirge.

See this ancient riverbed

See where all my follies led

Down by the water and down by the old main drag

I was just some towheaded teen

Feeling ‘round for fingers to get in between

Down by the water and down by the old main drag

The season rubs me wrong

The summer swells anon

(he smiles here as the rain pelts his face)

So knock me down, tear me up

But I would bear it all, broken, just to fill my cup

Down by the water and down by the old main drag

If anyone were around to hear him, maybe they’d cringe at his singing voice, which if we’re being honest is not going to win him any awards. Maybe they’d wonder what this crazed, rain-soaked creature’s purpose was. Maybe their hearts would break. No one knows.

He’s always been drawn to beaches; they lie at the borderlands of the infinite. A thin stretch of sand separates all you know and take for granted from the endless green/grey of the sea. Turn one way and see your life, turn the other and contemplate a roiling force that could end that life in seconds. We made our choice eons ago and slipped from beneath the waves, but they call to us still—come back, they whisper. Come back and float. Be free.

Those waves lie. He knows it. They’ve tried to take him before. The Persian Gulf’s waves almost drowned him once, when he was five years old. The sea has held his grudging respect ever since.

It’s the infinite sea that draws him today. Somewhere in that vastness is room enough to hold the curse that rides within his pocket: a symbol of a life killed on the vine.

Thunder rolls to the south, and he laughs at it. “Feel like getting struck by lightning?” he asks the dog.

She merely stares at him. Throw the stick.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he says. “I think you’re safe. Me, I’m the tallest thing around, so I’m fucked.”

But paradoxically, the thunder signals the storm’s end rather than its beginning. Rain tapers off and ceases altogether moments later.

“It’s a sign!” he cries to the sky, and chuckles madly. It’s laughter that might make you lock your car door if you heard it while sitting in traffic.

He reaches within his pocket and pulls out a ring.

It’s a simple band of white gold. He remembers paying $25 for it at Sears, of all places, well over seven years ago. It rode shotgun on one of his fingers for so long it wore a groove in the skin, a telltale mark that took months to fade away when he pulled the cursed thing off and consigned it to a shelf in a seldom-visited room of his house.

Waves pound against the beach. Come on in, they whisper secretly. The water’s fine.

It is fine. It’s cold, but still oh so fine. The dog follows him in, all curiosity, zero comprehension.

The ring sits perched in his palm, somehow feeling far weightier than it should. A few grams of metal, heavy with history, laden with symbolic meaning. He’s come here today to kill both. To cast them into the infinite, forever.

Ten years ago today, she admitted her love for him. He’d been waiting for her to say so first; every time he’d been the first to speak that three-word mantra, things had ended in disaster. Letting her—no, forcing her to be the one to breach that barrier seemed a guaranteed means to break a long-running curse.

And for the longest time—for such a long goddamned time—that curse did indeed seem broken at last. He wasn’t living happily ever after, just living happily. For awhile. Until he wasn’t.

By coincidence or by design (it doesn’t matter which), he’s come here at low tide. He marches into the sea, letting it overflow his ankles, his calves, his knees. It would soak his shorts if the rain hadn’t done its job already. He doesn’t quite reach waist level, as his toes find a sudden, sharp drop in the sand beneath them.

This far and no farther, he realises.

The ring sits in his palm. Burning. Burning him.

A wave approaches.

Now.

He hurls the thing into the sea with a high-decibel “HAAAA!” following it from behind, a yawp any Kung Fu instructor might recognise. He watches it impact the wave’s surface and instantly disappear beneath the grey.

Relief. Overwhelming, substantial, tangible relief. But at the same time, a supernova of rage explodes inside his head as he returns to the beach. He turns back to the sea and screams at it. There is no pain in this scream, no regret, no fear. Only rage. Bottomless, infinite, and as cold and grey as the sea that calmly absorbs his screams.

It’s not even rage meant for her. Not anymore. That flavour passed along with her presence. With 12,000 or more kilometres separating them, she is no more a part of his landscape than the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Space Needle. Nothing more than a memory, or an object at most, abstract, indefinite, and ultimately unimportant.

He turns north and retraces his steps, with the sea at his left. He briefly wonders whether some hapless soul will eventually discover the thing he’s hurled away, and how many years it might be—one, five, a hundred, ten thousand?

It doesn’t matter, he decides finally. It’s not my problem anymore.

He marches northward, for hours, back toward his car and his highway and his city and his home and his life. Occasionally he glances backward, and contrary to the popular modern Christian imagery, he sees zero sets of footprints in the sand. The sea swallows them, as it does everything else here in these borderlands. Before he even reaches his car, all evidence that he was even here today will have disappeared forever.

But for now, at the top of his lungs and in a voice tinged with jubilant madness, he sings.

“NAAAA, NAA NAA NANA NA NA! NANA NA NA! HEEEEY JUDE!”

He wonders feverishly how long it will take before people—women in particular, and even more particularly women he’s trying to date—no longer remark on how “weird” it is that he’s already looking for someone else.

He wonders when—or if—someone will accept him for who he is. Wonders if that’s even plausible, much less possible.

The sea churns, bearing its secret, cursed cargo to who cares where.

“PLEASED TO MEET YOU! HOPE YOU GUESS MY NAME! BUT WHAT’S PUZZLING YOU IS JUST THE NATURE OF MY GAME!”

Himatangi Beach could easily stand in for any of a hundred fictional beaches. The beach at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Easily. With no signs of life other than himself and his dog, it’s easy to think Apocalypse came after all, as foretold by the Mayans, and all life on Earth was on an inevitable spiral toward silence. Contrary to the heavy regret infusing McCarthy’s book, he wouldn’t feel particularly heartbroken by The End of All Things should it come to pass. It would seem almost a natural extension of a long line asymptotically approaching zero, if we’re graphing “give a shit” on the Y-axis.

The beach at the beginning of Stephen King’s The Drawing of the Three? But of course. And a did-a-chick and dod-a-chock to you, gunslinger, if it do ya fine. Bring him a horde of lobstrosities that he might dine on them for many and many-a. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a door to another where and another when floating upon the beach. And what would that door have printed upon it in a fine filigree of the High Speech? Perhaps: “The Lion”. And it’s a door to the autumn of 2002, into his younger self, when he’s presented with two equally enticing choices, and he makes what he thinks is the “safer” pick. Mayhap he walks through that door, into the mind of his younger self, and comes forward long enough to force himself to make the unsafe choice. Mayhap he winds up better off for it. Mayhap not. No way to know; there’s no door here today, or ever. That door was shut long ago.

“ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER, PRINCES KEPT THE VIEW,” he tells the sea. “WHILE ALL THE WOMEN CAME AND WENT. BAREFOOT SERVANTS TOO.”

He sees cars ahead, outside in the cold distance. He doesn’t hear a wild cat a-growl, however, which isn’t surprising; they’re not at all common in New Zealand.

Two riders are approaching (on motorcycles) as the wind begins to howl.

“I am un chien andalusia,” he asserts in a softer voice. “I wanna grow up to be, be a debaser.”

A boy and his dog walk along The Beach.

Waves crash against the sand; over the eons they’ll reshape the land into shapes unknown and unimaginable. Long after the boy and his dog are both buried in New Zealand’s topsoil, the waves will go on crashing against the sand.

And who is to say what will happen to that tiny, secret, forever damned cargo granted to them today? It won’t corrode or dissolve or melt. It may wash out to the middle of the Tasman and descend to depths incredible and forever unreachable. Or it may wash in with the very next high tide and be discovered days hence by some befuddled and curious seven-year-old girl.

“Look what I found, mum,” she’ll cry out, perhaps.

Or perhaps not.

A boy and his dog drive away from The Beach, and away from the past. Eyes forward, ever forward, into the future.

Soundtrack for the year 2012

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:41:43 +1300

I’ve assembled a 42-song soundtrack that sonically maps out the experiences I had this year. Well, the last four months of it anyway. This exercise will be of precisely zero interest to anyone but myself (as with most of the things I do in my spare time), but I don’t really give a shit (ditto).

Even passing familiarity with any of the songs below and/or my craptastic final 120 or so days of this year will give a general idea of the overall theme here, but in case you need it spelled out, here’s the general progression of moods throughout this tasting session of the 2012 vintage:

Shock, fury, abject depression, acceptance (part one), rage, despondency, acceptance (part two), determination, renewal, hope, infatuation, love, bliss, confusion, desperation, frustration, misery, acceptance (part three), a blend of tenacity/sorrow/ambition, and finally we finish off with a late harvest “Fuck It”.

I’m probably the most stubborn and tenacious motherfucker born in the past fifty years, but 2013 had damned well better be an improvement over 2012. Even I have limits.

The good news is 2012 has sucked so mightily that even a mediocre year where precisely nothing exciting happens but flipping calendar pages would be a gigantic upgrade.

Go fuck yourself, 2012. You were the worst year ever, and I won’t be sad to see the back of you eight days from today.

"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal."

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 17:35:56 +1200

“Truth is stranger than fiction” is the strangest truth of all. If I tried to do the opposite of some infamous memoirists and sell my true life story as a fictional novel, no publisher would ever agree to sell it. The twists and turns of my life defy any idea of narrative cohesion. Roughly once every five years the thread of my life takes an abrupt, hairpin deviation, and I find my narrative being reinvented once again.

The person writing this bears almost no resemblance to who he was in 2007, and the 2007 version wouldn’t have recognised the directionless, angry young American from 2002. Go back to 1997, and you’ll find someone even less recognisable. 1992, 1987, 1982, 1977…

Each of those years in a different part of the world. Each of those years living in completely different circumstances that, without description in great detail of the steps in between, make no sense at all:

1977: Born in California.

1982: In a Saudi Arabia kindergarten.

1987: In northwestern Washington State, watching my parents get divorced.

1992: High school in southeastern Washington.

1997: In upstate New York, undergoing training to become a nuclear-rated electrician in the US Navy.

2002: Going to community college in Washington State. In love with a 6’ 2” 20-year-old girl living in Ohio.

2007: Working in Cleveland, married to that 6’ 2” girl from Ohio. Graduating with a Bachelor’s in English.

2012: Living and working in New Zealand, and—

I won’t describe in any but the broadest of strokes the latest completely nonsensical turn my life took a week ago today. Suffice it to say that an editor reviewing a novel written of my life’s story would at this point be shaking his head and saying aloud the same words that have been echoing through my mind for the past seven days:

What. The. Fuck.

I wrote my Master’s thesis in 2010, focusing on the intersection of metafiction and memoir. I explored the idea of what might happen if a person became confronted with the unreality of his reality, suddenly aware of his status as a character in a story manipulated by an authorial presence beyond his control.

In the first draft of the thesis, titled Infinite Regress, this character was living in New Zealand and trying to recover after his wife abruptly left him and returned to the United States. He’d wanted to stay in New Zealand, but she hadn’t. It was that friction that drove a wedge between them, until eventually the gulf was too wide for reconciliation. This character was abandoned to fend for himself in Palmerston North, and although he eventually recovered from this devastating loss, it also became clear to him that his life was a fiction. The unreality of his situation was so profound that it could only have been written by a vindictive and remorseless author—one who, by strange coincidence, was me.

I wrote that two years ago. Today, a small part of me can’t help but wonder if I’m truly living at the top level of the Inception-like pyramidal structure of Infinite Regress, or if there’s another author in the next layer above mine… some drunken hack whose idea of a good yarn is M. Night Shyamalan-style twists instead of weaving a story that makes any goddamned sense whatsoever.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction… especially when life imitates art.

10 things Coca-Cola won't tell you: A satire of the dumbest thing I've read all month

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:42:39 +1200

This Marketwatch post by Quentin Fottrell, “10 things Apple won’t tell you”, perfectly exemplifies why people who don’t understand tech shouldn’t write about it. Right out of the gate, the top 10 format is a warning sign of a fluff piece. When you feel you’ve got to round it out to a nice, even number like that, it’s a virtual certainty that at least one of your items is going to be chock full of nonsense.

In this case, all ten items are overflowing with stupid. It reads like a checklist of every tired anti-Apple cliché out there; by the time you get to the end (my sympathies if you do), the only idiotic chestnuts Fottrell’s missed are “walled garden” and “child labour”. He trots out the “Apple as religion” metaphor so often it’s a wonder he managed to write about anything else.

Do people who write this flotsam ever pause between keystrokes and ponder how completely over-the-top empty-headed they’re being? Do they not realise that doing a find-and-replace of “Apple” with virtually any other company’s name makes absolutely everything they’ve written sound like some guy in an Idaho cabin wrote this using deer piss and toilet paper?

Let’s find out. Let me write essentially the same piece, but talking about Coca-Cola instead of Apple. Let’s see how stupid we can all make ourselves feel by the end of it.

10 things Coca-Cola wont tell you

1. “Our customers are worn out.”

All the excitement over Coca-Cola has quickly given way to what analysts are dubbing “drinking fatigue”—with even Coke’s most loyal customers upset about the steady stream of new cans. In fact, when people buy Coke’s latest product, the company is usually already preparing its replacement, said some dude who’s drunk 23,000 cans of Coke over the past 20 years. “Everything we buy from them is already out of date,” he says. Take a count: since 2001, there have been six trillion servings of Coca-Cola products.

Of course, newer cans of Coke have their upsides: They’re usually colder, fresher and have additional features like carbonation and improved best-by dates. And Coke, which declined to comment for this story, has said that such improvements more than justify the fast pace of their new additions.

But that argument isn’t enough to appease some cash-strapped consumers. Almost 50% of consumers say they’re increasingly unwilling to buy new cans for fear they will be rendered empty, according to a recent survey of hapless bozos.

It doesn’t stop with cans of Coca-Cola, said experts: fast food chains also gently nudge people to buy soft drinks. Last month, Coca-Cola shipped billions of batches of syrup and carbon dioxide to McDonald’s, but the products have a limited shelf life. Some franchise owners expressed their unhappiness online. One irate franchisee wrote, “I don’t care how much you plan for obsolescence, there is no way that new syrup should not be shelf-stable for at least a couple of years.”

2. “Be careful of that sugar.”

Coca-Cola—that red can that’s the primary source of nutrition for fat teens—may sound like cheap fun, but costs can add up. An eight-year-old from Rockville unwittingly spent $1400 on insulin after drinking so much Coke she developed Type II diabetes, the Washington Post reported. After complaining, her mother received a one-time reimbursement. These sodas are available in convenience stores and referred to as “fountain drinks”. They’re relatively inexpensive, but only for a certain amount of time until the sugar intake causes you to develop serious medical issues. Under the tutorship of Ronald McDonald, kids are given the option to buy Coke and drink it until their pancreases explode.

3. “We’re getting in the way.”

Having an occasional Coke and a smile during dinner is the least of some couple’s worries. One in five people reach for a Coke as a 21st Century replacement for the post-coital cigarette, according to a recent report from area peeping Toms. It’s just one more extreme example of how soft drinks have become a third wheel in relationships, says some therapist who’s pimping her new book. “People find all sorts of ways to get that fizzy feeling in their nose,” she says. “But clearly it’s a problem if someone wants to chug a Coke in the bedroom.”

Some people’s relationship with God is also being interrupted by that familiar pop-topping sound of the can—or the popped tops from their neighbours in the pews. One in 10 people drink a Coke during religious services, another survey says. “People don’t even tend to think about any of this as a breach of etiquette anymore,” says another guy with something to sell. “They see their cans as an extension of themselves.”

Personal responsibility and manners aside, there are other theories about why people can’t put their Coke down. “Coke’s products are addictive,” says Captain Obvious, author of “Can’t Beat the Real Thing: How Coke is Destroying Humanity”. In fact, many users are aware of their attachment to their sodas. Some 25% of people see their soft drinks as “dangerously alluring” and 41% said spilling their Coke would be “a tragedy” according to a 2010 poll.

4. “You may spend more with our sodas.”

Not only do Coca-Cola’s products tend to be pricier than Sam’s Club or other store-brand competitors, people spend more using them. The average Coke drinker, for example, spends over 10% more on their monthly bills than Sam’s Club drinkers—$90 versus $81—according to estimates by some guy you don’t know from Adam. Coke drinkers also tend to spend more at ecommerce sites than other soda drinkers. Coke drinkers spend $158 per order—the highest order of any soda—versus $105 by people drinking other carbonated beverages, according to a recent survey by some company that’s supposedly relevant to anyone at all.

Why the splurge? Some say Coke feels like a high-end drink—the liquid equivalent of Saks Fifth Avenue or Barney’s. Others say it’s because Coke is easy to drink: “Coke is a very intuitive and compelling product,” says some guy who just opened his throat and drained four cans in one go. “Just like Pringles’ ‘Once you pop you can’t stop’, Coke encourages people to make impulse purchases.” Plus, those who can afford $10 or more for a 12-pack of Coke are more likely to have higher disposable income than those who buy RC Cola, said some guy who thinks the taste of RC reminds him of the shattered dreams of his childhood.

5. “We need another game-changing drink.”

Tooth decay isn’t the only thing critics dislike about Coke’s product rollouts; some say the new products aren’t new enough. Investors are growing impatient with Coke’s pipeline and calling for another beverage revolution. It’s time for Coke to shake up the soft drink market again, says some dude too stoned to remember New Coke. He says a completely new Coca-Cola drink that costs less than the $1.49 starting retail price for a Coca-Cola would be a good start. Other deep-pocketed beverage companies are also poised to compete with Coke with their own liquids. Anheiser-Busch is also reportedly considering developing its own soda and Pepsi, which bought Taco Bell/Pizza Hut several years ago, is reportedly building its own Pepsi Classic. (Anheiser-Busch and Pepsi declined to comment.)

Coke still has strong sales, but no company should be so dependent on one beverage. In fact, Coca-Cola makes up more than 50% of Coca-Cola’s sales, according to research by people, for reasons. “Remember when beer, wine, and water led the beverage market?” they say. “Market share can change very quickly.” Another reason for a beverage that addresses the lower end of the market: the days of fast food companies offering massive subsidies to consumers are numbered, some dude in line at Wendy’s says. If and when that happens, he says most people won’t pay $3 for a Coke. Coca-Cola disagrees. A company spokeswoman noted in February that despite its price tag, “Coca-Cola has been an incredible hit with customers around the world.”

6. “A 2-litre of Coke is overpriced—even compared to a 12-pack.”

A 2-litre of Coke costs more than $8 less than a 12-pack, but Coke has much higher profit margins for the 2-litre than the 12-pack, experts say. Here’s how it breaks down: numbers numbers numbers numbers numbers math math math statistics statistics bullshit math statistics numbers numbers.

“Is a 2-litre of Coke expensive? Yes,” says some guy tripping balls in the parking lot of a KFC. “Is it overpriced? Yes.” Consumers think they pay a cheaper price for Cokes as fast-food chains absorb two-thirds of the original retail price, he says. However, customers who drink their Coke and buy a new one after throwing their cup away instead of asking for a refill are paying a premium, he says.

7. “Don’t be fooled by our soft sell.”

When Slappy Sackmeister recently walked into a McDonald’s, the “cashier” wanted to talk to his two children about Ronald McDonald. Only after he had charmed both children did the employee turn to Sackmeister. “It was an extremely artful piece of salesmanship,” says Sackmeister, author of “BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK!” Art dealer Terrence McAscot had a slightly different experience in another McDonald’s when he approached a cashier brandishing an empty Coke can. “It will make a cool paperweight,” the cashier told McAscot before promptly offering him a medium Coke.

These two stories illustrate two things, experts say: Coke knows if children want Coke’s products their parents will want them too—and they never bombard customers with chemistry talk. “They always start off by asking you about your lifestyle and your thirst,” says another guy with flagging book sales. “They emotionally engage you so it’s harder to say no to their products.” Other beverages focus on price and nutritional content but are slowly taking a cue from Coke, he says.

The gleaming, futuristic bottle designs are another important part of Coke’s retail puzzle, experts say. “Picking up these spectacular, fantasy containers helps people forget about the outside world,” says some rube with a marketing degree. “They worship the product like they would in a church.” The approach seems to be working: Coke is the top seller per can among major U.S. chains, according to a 2012 survey. For the four quarters to August 2011, Coke sold approximately a metric buttload of bottles and cans, just clap your hands, just clap your haaaands.

8. “Our features are falling behind.”

Some consumers want Coca-Cola to follow Pepsi’s lead by changing the logo every six months. Some chick at the mall recently gave up Coke because the logo hasn’t changed in over 100 years. “I seriously can’t read anything on that can,” she says. “I feel old, and worse, large-thumbed.” (She’s 42.) She has plenty of other options to choose from: Mountain Dew and 7-Up both have snazzy new logos. And Pepsi has a logo that looks just like the one the 2008 Obama campaign used—dwarfing Coke’s ancient logo. According to some review site, “19th century cursive just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

126 years after its launch and several can designs later, some analysts say Coke is starting to feel dated. Coke drinkers can often be found trying to get refills in Starbucks, says some dude who paid for pot but got pencil shavings in a bag. Pepsi’s new bottles have replaceable screw tops, allowing consumers to refill them at 7-11 if they felt like doing that for some crazy-ass reason. What’s more, fans point out that a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi has more liquid than a 12-ounce can of Coke—more than 20 ounces of Pepsi versus 12 for Coke. For big drinkers, a 2-litre of Pepsi has half a gallon of soda.

One of the biggest new features on the Coke can—the best by date—has not always lived up to customers’ expectations. Cans of Coke stay tasty by their best-by date only 68% of the time, according to some guy without a working refrigerator. That said, Coke continues to have one big advantage over the competition, say experts: the cool factor. Plus, it has yet to release Coca-Cola 5, which is expected later this fall. But tastes can change quickly. In fact, Pepsi recently overtook Coke to become the number one soda vendor by volume, according to Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.

9. “We’ll hook you for life.”

Caffeine may lock in customers for life. There’s good reason Coke offers cans in vending machines, analysts say. “Once you’re in, it’s a one-stop shop.” Coke’s vending machines are different from other companies’ for one critical reason: they work exclusively with Coke products, while Pepsi will sell you Mountain Dew, 7-Up, or any soda under Pepsi’s brand. Meanwhile, there are a range of third-party vending machines like the ones at Wal-Mart and shopping malls that allow customers to buy sodas from RC Cola, Pepsi, or Coke.

It’s also difficult to move liquid from a can of Coke to a third-party can like RC Cola. (Though it’s not impossible: there are third-party tools like a funnel designed to make the transition easier.) Experts say Coke has other sticky features, too. By including caffeine and a fizz that doesn’t die down right off the bat, the beverage will hit your pleasure centre more often. But the feature is not transferrable to non-Coke beverages. Some guy with a BMI of 42 has drunk thousands of Cokes but will barf up a lung if he drinks V-8 vegetable juice. “I made a commitment to drink Coke,” he says, “and now I’m stuck with it.”

10. “Our fans don’t care if we screw up.”

Of course, many customers are happy to be part of Coke’s global community: A Facebook page, “Coca-Cola”, has over 46,000,000 likes. And when it comes to controversy about or criticism of the company, experts say the company’s loyal fan base often have a blind spot. Some tosspot with a marketing degree compares Coke’s cult-like following among some drinkers to bikers who own Harley-Davidson motorcycles (for some reason never adequately explained).

Indeed, many Coke customers stay loyal to the company even when it disappoints them. In 1985 the company introduced New Coke to universal derision. Petitioners demanded Coke go back to its own formula. However, these people said they wouldn’t stop drinking Coke or even recycling its cans. “I love Coke and don’t want to stop drinking it.” Coke may also have stolen some of its critics’ thunder by being open about its shortcomings. The company apologised for New Coke on live TV.

But Coke’s marketing also encourages this tribal following, industry pros say. The company’s borderline “fairytale” or “religious” language also helps stir up passionate support for the brand and upsets people when Coke is criticised, says some guy who’s seriously on his knees begging you to buy his book already, who adds, “Coke knows how to inspire its customers.” Case in point: the company’s website contains this statement about its soft drink: “Yes. Coca-Cola.”

Travel time from Los Angeles to Beijing, via ass-kicking

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:07:22 +1200

“With karate I’ll kick your ass from here to Tiananmen Square!” —Tenacious D, 2001

How long would it take for you to arrive at Tiananmen Square if Jack Black used karate to kick your ass in Los Angeles?

Let’s suppose Jack Black kicks your 80 kg ass with 270 Newtons of force, which Livestrong says is the force an average football player imparts to the ball. Let’s also assume 0.05 seconds of contact between Jack Black’s foot and your ass.

f = (w*v)/t

f*t= w*v

f*t/w= v

(270 N * .05 s)/80 kg = 0.17 metres/second = 0.6 kph

That’s not very fast at all. Not even a slow walk.

How long would it take to cover the 10,000 km distance between L.A. and Beijing at that speed?

10,000 km / 0.6 kph = 16,666.7 hours

= 1.9 years

Better pack a lunch.

The Damnable Cycle

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 17:59:30 +1200

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face… forever.”

Or, if you’re an American curious how your government really works, you can merely watch for easily discernible patterns. I call it The Damnable Cycle.

Cycle 1: Republican President

Characteristics: War, or at least massive military buildup. Low taxes for the rich. Massive deficit, ballooning national debt. Economy utterly shitboxed. Democrat-controlled Congress lacks unity of vision or clarity of purpose, enabling the Republican Party to run roughshod over everything in its path. “Family values” presented as a temporarily successful attempt to distract the teeming masses of economically-disadvantaged citizenry from realising who is truly at fault for their plight.

Outcome: Siphoning money toward the military and well-connected rich campaign contributors eventually backfires when the Electorate is confronted with a Democratic candidate promising sweeping government reforms and fair taxation that will ostensibly lead to economic prosperity. Despite a last-ditch effort at distraction, with appeals to patriotism and religiosity, the Republicans lose the election badly.

Cycle 2: Democratic President

Characteristics: Cutbacks in military spending, often sweeping. Proposals for tax hikes on the rich, which never go through. Economic recovery is directly tied to the success or failure of the private sector, because all attempts at Administration intervention are blocked by Republican members of Congress. Unlike the Democrats, who consistently lack unity, the Republican Party is utterly unified on two principles: 1. Stop the Democratic administration from accomplishing any of its promised reforms, and 2. Blame the Democrats for exacerbating current socioeconomic woes via incompetent inaction during the next election.

Outcome: Republican tactics of preventing the Democratic Party from passing a single helpful piece of legislation during this cycle work superbly. The populace, fed up with what it sees as weak-willed handwringing from the Democratic President, turns to a Republican candidate campaigning on his personal strength, “family values”, religiosity, and patriotism. Lacking a clear rebuttal, the Democrats lose the election badly.

Cycle 3: Republican President

A repeat of Cycle 1 in virtually every detail.

Cycle 4: Democrat President

A repeat of Cycle 2 in virtually every detail.

Ad infinitum.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Republican Congressman lighting your descendants’ futures on fire… forever.

Hippies, I am sick of your bitching

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:38:25 +1300

I spent weeks last year, and the year before that, being inundated by morons claiming that Apple’s products were assembled by legions of Chinese children. None of these mouthbreathers bothered to actually read Apple’s annual Supplier Responsibility Report; instead, they just parroted whatever sensationalist bullshit they’d read in birdcage-liners like The Telegraph or Gizmodo.

It’s happening yet again this year, with drearily idiotic seasonality. “Hard-hitting exposés” from the New York Times. A guy with a Broadway show where he spends hours bitching about Foxconn. Suburbanite hippies with no sense of irony using their Chinese-built PCs and Chinese-built printers to print out 250,000 pointless, toothless internet petition signatures, then delivering them to bemused Apple Retail workers with no power over the situation whatsoever.

“Apple is benefitting from sweatshops!” these people bray. “They should do something!”

These people seem to have it in their heads that these Chinese factories are Dickensian horrors where people work under the brutal lash of overseers, 18 hours per day, seven days per week, inhaling coal dust and mainlining heavy metals, sipping watery gruel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and bedding down on a straw mattress for a few fitful hours’ respite before the terror begins anew the next day. These people have been made to think this way because hyperbole sells newspapers.

We hear about how the Chinese workers work long hours, get paid very little, and (the horror!) actually spend most of their work shifts standing up. We hear the workers complain of being tired, of feeling unappreciated, of how they wish things were better.

Here’s a thought: go to any factory anywhere in the world, even the few factories still running in the United States, and find a single one where things are any different.

Most of these people bitching and whining about conditions in Chinese factories — conditions that it’s fair to say few of them have seen in person — have probably never set foot in an operational factory even once in their lives, much less actually worked in one.

Guess what? I have. I worked in a factory in Ohio for about a month in 2004. And nothing that I’ve heard reported from the Foxconn factories sounds any worse than what I endured during my brief fling with factory work.

Long hours? Check: ten hours a day.
Low pay? Check: seven bucks an hour, terrible wages even for Ohio, and unlike the wages Foxconn workers earn, far below the cost of living for the area.
A dehumanising work environment? Oh, you better believe check; factory work is about the most mentally torturous job imaginable.
Unsafe conditions? Check: huge, loud machines with exposed moving parts, constant risk of RSI, etc.
Exposure to chemicals? Check: plastic resin fumes, propane gas, and all kinds of other shit I don’t even want to think about.
Unsympathetic management? Check: anybody not wearing a Tyvek bunny suit couldn’t have given a shit less about people on the floor if they’d had step-by-step instructions.
Mandatory overtime? Super-duper-check; in fact, it was my discovery of the company’s mandatory overtime policies that convinced me to quit then and there, without notice. Ten hours a day, five days a week wasn’t enough for these assholes; no, they wanted ten hours a day six days a week, and I had no option to refuse other than quitting.

Factory work by its very nature is gruelling, inhumane, unsafe, and fucking terrible. If you think Apple is going to step into Foxconn’s Shenzhen plants, wave a unicorn horn around, and make it so every single worker gets a free daily massage, $100 a day, and a personal sense of accomplished fulfillment as a side dish to a pampered life of luxury, think again hippy.

If an American factory can suck as much as it did in 2004, there’s not much hope you can turn a Chinese factory into Disneyland Shenzhen no matter how much money or how many petition signatures you throw at the problem.

Factory work sucks, period. It will never not suck. Stop kidding yourself if you think it will… but also stop kidding yourself that these workers are being “abused”. No one is forcing them to work for Foxconn. No one is being “enslaved”; in fact, people line up by the thousands for the opportunity to work there.

Apple is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: yearly audits to discover actual worker abuses, and corrective action for repeat offenders, up to and including severance of the business relationship. The working conditions may sound horrible by your pampered suburbanite standards, where the most uncomfortable part of your day is the daily commute, but I’m willing to bet if I spent a day walking the floor at Foxconn, I wouldn’t witness anything worse than what I experienced firsthand in Ohio.

As for your hemming and hawing over Apple having its devices built under such “terrible conditions,” I humbly suggest you inspect your clothing tags and tell me where your T-shirt and hipster jeans were made. I can damned near guarantee you that your clothing, your TV, your stereo, and even a lot of your food were manufactured under exponentially more brutal conditions than Foxconn’s workers face.

Enough of the “sweatshop Apple” bullshit. I’m sick of your bitching.