House of Eratosthenes

My Dad’s a Dad. My brother is a Dad. There are no mothers in my family, which is a rather unhappy situation. Mother’s Day whistles right on by us. I harass my kid to call his mother, squeeze some money into his hand so he can get her something, and then I buy my girlfriend something nice to thank her for helping to raise him. That’s what passes for Mother’s Day, so you would think I would be Johnny-on-the-spot celebrating Father’s Day.

And I should. But Freebergs are never on-time buying gifts…hardly ever.

The girlfriend has been buying all of the food for the last two or three years. It’s just part of the way we’ve decided to divide up the bills. She has suffered a setback lately, so I insisted that she should stay home tonight and I’d take care of the shopping list after work. I came out at 3:30 this morning to answer nature’s call and saw the shopping list dutifully written out and draped across the keyboard of Blogger Central where I’d be sure not to miss it.

And so after work, per our agreement, I clocked out and set out on the streets of Niner Fiver Six Three Zed. I have some bills I need to pay; the late Father’s Day presents need to be acquired; we need the grub, and the remote has conked out on my beloved Memorex DVD/VHS combo player. It is this last one that perturbs me the most. The player is six years old — I acquired it very soon after “Kidzmom” walked out — and I have never had a lick o’ trouble with it. But button by button, the remote ceased to do my bidding and now it is altogether inoperable. The player itself still runs like a champ. But my failed attempt at interfacing it with a Panasonic universal remote, suggests that the problem is the unit’s planned obsolescence and it is time to graduate to another. For no reason but planned obsolescence. And you better believe that chaps my hide.

Without any way to direct the player to start and stop, I’m burning through Dukes of Hazzard episodes whole discs at a time. This is time consuming, and furthermore, I’m working my way through Season Six at a pace far too hasty for my liking.

I paid one bill. I got the foodstuffs. Man oh man…I tell you, The Good Lord did not build men for grocery stores. Talk about bringing back old, bad memories. This probably brings to a close a solid two years not having to step into a grocery store. It’s gotten much worse than I remember. People are text messaging now. I feel like the front of my grocery cart should have some cow-catcher device on it to shove people out of the way, as they remain transfixed on their little viewscreens.

No Father’s Day presents. None at all. I ended up having to jot out an apologetic e-mail, meekly asking if the dads had already acquired iPods. I needed to know. Retail electronics purchases have come to this — here, let me quote myself: “If I don’t have an i-thing, and I don’t know anybody who does, they have nothing to sell me.” Yes, that is it. Our “Electronics Department” has rechargeable batteries and it has games for the XBox 360 and PS3. Other than that, it has things that interface with an iPod. And some LCD television sets…that is all. The vast bulk of it is things that interface with the iPod. Cases. Cables. Batteries. Battery packs. Chips. Cards. Sockets. Alarm clocks. Boom boxes.

This is not good for Folsom. I have watched this place for a long, long time…a very long time. It has been very strongly and sensibly engineered around an objective of raising toddlers in a healthy environment, and this has worked out very, very well. Well guess what: The toddlers aren’t toddlers anymore. They are teenagers and young adults. The neighborhood parks are not as much a staple to life as they used to be. The kids have constructed social lives for themselves, if you want to call them that, that revolve around listening to personal tunes with little white earphone cords.

For all the acreage and all the capital and all the sweat that has been invested in retail here, you cannot really buy that much in Folsom. Men my age — and the women, even moreso, I suspect — are concerned about our midsections, so you can buy lots of machines that are supposed to exercise your tummy. And Jamba Juice, books, arts & crafts, all sorts of things you can buy just about anywhere else. So retail-wise, there’s no reason to come here.

Home-wise, there’s not much reason to come here either. We have lots of middle-age empty-nesters who bought their houses so they could raise their babies, and now the babies have grown and left. For college.

The traffic lights and signs are erected for the purpose of fighting you as you drive through them. Fighting you not regulating you; they nurture an inimical relationship with you that you can feel as it wafts through the air.

I have joked before — in a dark way, not in a “hah hah” kind of way — that the Folsom motorists who make the traffic such a stressful experience, being the assholes they are, are actually sympathetic figures. Their wretched behavior is a symptom and not a cause. You get this way when you have such a modest list of errands to do within a patch of four square miles, and it takes you two and a half hours. I feel it happening to me.

Perfect slogan for Folsom: “What’s up with this jerk riding my ass, he acts like every second counts, where’s he going in such a hurry? And what’s up with this asshole in front of me? He’s going to make me late!”

It’s like being in a zombie movie. They harass you and harass you and harass you, and then one of them bites you and you become one of them.

Even better slogan for Folsom: “I’m never in the way. You always are.”

The morale of this story? Shop on time for Father’s Day. On Amazon. That’s the way the world works now. And whoever is in charge of buying the food in your household — by which I mean, going out on foot and bringing it — if it isn’t you, then you really should think about going out of your way to do something to thank them.

I’m going to be forty-four pretty soon. When I do certain things and they, just by their very nature, cause my blood pressure to go up, I experience a sharp drop in my interest in doing them. You’ll notice people twice my age show precisely this tendency, and on average enforce it twice as strongly.

I think we’re going to be ordering some groceries brought to our doorstep more & more often in the months ahead.

Insightful and entertaining, with a peek into the man who is M.K. Freeberg. These are always my favorite posts.

Re: the in a hurry thing, that’s why I’ve pretty much stopped being in a hurry unless it’s a real emergency. But I notice that mindset on the road. There are the people you’ve passed, and the people you’ve yet to pass. I think it’s relativity. If everybody’s moving approximately the same speed, you cease to notice actual landscape going by and the other traffic becomes the landscape. If you’re not passing, you’re not “getting anywhere”.

As far as running errands in town, as much as this town has grown it’s still pretty much a given that you can get from anywhere in town to anywhere else in town in 20 minutes or less. All the same, we recycle more Amazon boxes …..

It’s just so much more convenient to type in exactly what you’re looking for, have a page come up, decide if you want to pay that for it, and wait a few days then to go ask clueless employees at a hardware store and have them tell you that they don’t have something that, upon further investigation you find that they most certainly DO have.

Incidentally, on the remote…. I have this logitech remote I bought for the wife because she hated dealing with 4 remotes … and you can program this puppy to do anything by hooking it up to the ‘puter via USB, and go to a website and search for your components, and it just programs it. And if yours is one of the odd few they don’t have out there (which is pretty rare) you can have it learn from your old remote. Then you set up macros so it turns on the components that need to be turned on to do task A, or B or C, or … setting the right inputs and such.

“Activities” “Watch DVD” Boom! There it is.

She loves it.
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 06:01
You’re talking about this?

Hmmm. It certainly is an idea.
- mkfreeberg | 06/22/2010 @ 06:39
Yeah, ours is in the 500 series … 520, 550 … something like that.

One of the things I find most amusing about her with it is some of the lesser used functions you have to go through a menu to get to (at least on ours) … and if the remote ever gets out of synch with what’s been turned on … something blocked the IR path to the amplifier or something while she was turning it on … she comments, but REFUSES help! Grabbing the right remote and pressing the right button would get everything back in synch again, but she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to use her special remote to do it, and it has a “help” feature which she will walk through as it trouble-shoots for her. “Is the television on?” “Is the input set to HDMI1?” “Is the amplifier on?” which are all things, that, if you knew the answer to, you could just grab the right remote and press the right button. But I think that what this has exposed with her is that it’s less an unwillingness to understand how it works than it is the clutter caused by the number of remotes.

It’s pretty cute to watch her insist on figuring it out and using her very own magic wand.

However, this doesn’t happen very often because most of the time it just “works”.
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 07:02
(incidentally, the “help” feature takes action on its own depending on how you answer the questions).
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 07:03
“then” to go ask? I HATE when I don’t proofread.

But not badly enough to do it consistently. 🙂
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 07:05
I was going to recommend some variant of a Logitech Harmony remote myself. I am on my second one, but only because the dog treated the first like a chew toy (that dog is gone, too). They’re perfect for what they do. If you get one, I’ll wager you’ll be glad of it. I have this one, but some of the buttons click really loudly when you press them, so I suggest another if that sort of thing bothers you.

Here in much of Seattle, Amazon will deliver your groceries, too. I am not sure how far out they have expanded their Amazon Fresh program to date.

Well, looks like it is still just Seattle.
- Andy | 06/22/2010 @ 07:06
philmon calls to mind something I wrote a while back.
- Andy | 06/22/2010 @ 07:10
I do like the idea of hanging on to the Memorex, it ranks extremely high on the list of appliances that have given back as good as they’ve gotten, across impressive lifespans. But this project is going to sink or swim on skeletal funding for the time being. The XBox that has been gathering dust plays these discs just fine.

Except I can’t quite remember the pass code for the parental lock. Whoops.
- mkfreeberg | 06/22/2010 @ 07:25
Yeah, ours I think is a Magnavox or some “M” brand we bought in 1991. Yup. You read that right.

The first remote died after getting wet in a water-pipe bursting incident.

The replacement was $70.

Granted, we rarely use the thing anymore, but it’s still there and it still works — and it even has the uber good sound … uh … “high def” sound feature.

And surely there’s a way to blow that pass code for the parental lock out electronically.

Google is your friend. Or a hypnotist 🙂
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 07:29
Ours is just a VHS player. We’ve been through like 3 DVD players. But the VHS player was our first joint purchase which pre-dates our marriage, back when we were both poor.

Nothing says commitment like buying a piece of electronic entertainment equipment together.
- philmon | 06/22/2010 @ 07:33
And surely there’s a way to blow that pass code for the parental lock out electronically. Google is your friend.

Nabbed it here.

I figured as much, but someone had to type it in to get me motivated, so thanks for that. Gonna text it to the girlfriend right away.
- mkfreeberg | 06/22/2010 @ 13:09
Too bad about your grocery shopping life experiences.

We have the Pike Street Market and various neighborhood farmers markets on the weekends around Seattle where good food is readily available. Uwajimaya is a terrific Asian grocery in my neighorhood where the selection of vegetable, noodles, rice and fish is astonishing.

I love to shop for food and prepare a good meal.

Unmanly?

Perhaps.

But women love it.
- Arthurstone | 06/22/2010 @ 15:52
Hey, nothing unmanly about that.
- mkfreeberg | 06/22/2010 @ 16:05
[…] To Rule Over Me Let’s Get Rid of Naked Protesting Yet Another Obama Critic Apologizes Memo For File CXVII More Insight on the Helen Thomas Thing Obama Blames Unemployment on Republicans Memo For File CXVI […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/24/2010 @ 19:51

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