Today between the hours of five and seven, the streets of Albany were filled with awesome. Whimsical awesome. Hilarious awesome. Great moments in Personal Cinematography awesome. Great Moments in Personal Cinematography is a game I used to play in New Orleans. Whenever I saw something that particularly wonderful, a moment or an image that was perfectly composed and lit and scripted and all that, and it didn't happen often, mind you, that was a Great Moment in Personal Cinematography. So far, counting today, I've had four. It's a hard game.
And, entirely because of all the awesome things in the streets of Albany between five and seven, today I had the best hour I've had in literally months. I was going to use this one word, "sad-sack bastard", to describe how I was no longer feeling because of the time I spent walking to the CVS and the bank, but the explanation of that got a little wordy and in fact became a separate, very silly post, so let us instead say that I had had a particularly grim and dispiriting day at work, and that it had been pretty much consistent with what I felt to be an unusually grim and dispiriting month, and I was kind of depressed and mostly feeling sorry for myself.
With those thoughts in mind, I got home from work, changed my shoes like Mr. Rogers and walked down Delaware Avenue to the CVS to drop off a prescription. I had some time, so I decided to take Holland down to New Scotland to go to the bank.
On the way, I saw a guy, who I think might have been on an airing from the local mental hospital (no joke, there is one), wearing a shirt with a life-size black and white portrait of Diana Rigg in her Mrs. Peel catsuit on it. I was so delighted by this that I started laughing out loud, prompting his also-potentially-on-an-airing-from the local mental hospital friend to tell me what a great night I was having. I courteously wished him the same, and walking away, heard him loudly tell his friend, "That was a beautiful girl!". His friend, a Diana Rigg fan, mind you, and therefore highly discerning judge of female attractiveness, albeit a possibly mental ill one, heartily agreed.
It might actually be an understatement to say I walked on air. If people knew the extraordinary impact of telling a strange girl she's beautiful and did it more often the world would be a much better place.
So, I went to the bank, and the ATM was broken, and while earlier I would have made this another mark on the grim and dispiriting tally sheet, I wasn't particularly upset, what with the air-walking and all. I walked back out, up the crappy part of New Scotland past the hospital, and everything was beautiful. Everything. The sun was shining, the grass was green, the air was as good as only air in upstate New York can be, and the street was full of interesting people doing interesting things. A dreadlocked guy dancing down the street to his iPod. Two pretty girls in coordinated outfits (pink shorts, black top and black shorts, pink top, respectively) jogging by the grinning salaryman in the perfectly matched lilac shirt and tie. The row of matching Tudor house on flawless green lawns that I had never noticed before. It seemed as though any moment the normally surly and unattractive people of the Capital Region where going to turn into animated doppelgangers of themselves and do a phenomenally choreographed, visually stunning CGI dance. A Pixar Oscar-clip type dance. A Great Moment in Personal Cinematography dance.
I felt great. The Go! Team was on my headphones, I was imagining them accepting the Oscar for Best Original Song, and I planned to cap off my walk with a thrilling and indulgent Vitamin Water at CVS. And then. Oh, and then.
And then a small Asian child ran down the other side of the street without pants on. If I had to list my absolute favorite things in the entire world, small Asian children, children without pants, toddlers running, and wildly incongruous things would be pretty damn close to the top. Here was all four in one, on Delaware Avenue! Almost nothing in my list of my absolute favorite things in the entire world happens on Delaware Avenue, except the food at My Linh (a great Vietnamese restaurant with a great courtyard), and the time they showed The Life Aquatic at the Spectrum (the crayon-colored ponyfish is on the list). It is not an area of high absolute favorite thing concentration, making the simultaneous occurrence of four completely goddamn remarkable.
The pantsless child was being followed at about ten paces behind by a father/brother/uncle
type, himself interesting for being an extremely buff Asian guy wearing only red boxing shorts. It was like he and his child had split one outfit between them, as the child was impeccably dressed from the waist up and ankles down.
Clots of people were gathered on the street to offer comments, or maybe do something else less important than watching the pantsless child, and the whole block seemed entirely joyful. We the passersby and residents of Delaware Avenue had formed a small, closely knit community, The No-Pants Asian Toddler Watchers, the NPATW's, and we were a proud and graceful people. "It's a boy!", yelled some hipster guy, and we agreed. It was definitely a boy. "No shirt, no shoes, no service!", remarked one of the old guys on the corner, and we as a community were struck by his wit. "Hey, at least he's having a good time," I offered, and the NPATW's concurred with that as well. And it was then that I noticed that I was having a good time, too, and I wasn't comparing it to something that happened in New Orleans or in my own head, and that I didn't feel lonely any more. I had turned the corner, and right around it was the pantsless child, and Delaware Avenue, and Albany, and everything that I had going for me right here. I wasn't a sad-sack bastard, at least not right then, and I bought some 99 cent gummy bears and the Vitamin Water to celebrate, and I came home and fixed dinner and sat down to tell all this to you.
Monday, July 28, 2008
My contribution to the English language
(Author's note: This is indulgent and silly. But hey, I'm back in the saddle!)
The ancient Greeks used a literary device called an epithet, in which a hyphenated phrase is linked to a noun, with examples being "wine-dark sea", "rosy-fingered dawn", and my personal favorite, "ox-eyed Hera".
Inasmuch as my colleagues (read: Mark and my brother) and I have always tried to emulate the ancient Greeks (mostly in our fondness for spears), we came up with our own epithet, "sad-sack bastard". It's an incredibly useful and versatile epithet, and in the last few years we came up with many ways to work it into our daily conversations.
Unlike many other phrases in the English language, the epithet "sad-sack bastard" works equally well as several different parts of speech.
Noun -"Quit being a sad-sack bastard."
Proper noun - "Well, look, Mr. Sad-Sack Bastard decided to grace us with his presence"
Adjective - "That's a sad-sack bastard thing to say."
Verb - "Stop sad-sack bastarding around."
Interjection "Hey! Sad-sack bastard!"
A sad-sack bastard, if you couldn't pick it up with the context clues, is not a desirable thing. Depending on the situation, a sad-sack bastard can be found brooding in his or her (it's gender neutral, another plus) room, listening to depressing music or obsessively pursuing meaningless goals in video games, ignoring the well-meant and potentially correct advice of friends and family, and generally refusing to directly interact with his or her problems.
The sad-sack bastard is not depressed. They may, at one point, have been depressed, for completely valid reasons, but those reasons and that depression no longer excuse their behavior. Neither is the sad-sack bastard put-upon. Again, they may have been at one point, but now they are either exaggerating the situation or needlessly prolonging it through their own inaction. The sad-sack bastard, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is not to be pitied. They are playing up the unfortunate circumstances of the recent past to addressing the problems of the present or future.
The only way to stop the sad-sack bastard in your life, or yourself, if you happen to be in that unhappy situation, from sad-sack bastarding around, generally bringing the local populace down, is to force them to directly engage with the issues they or you have retreated from into the grim land of sad-sack bastard. I have always favored yelling as de-sad-sack bastarding tool, but other parties have also tried cuddling, reasoned discourse, lavish gifts, slapping, or the forced administration of alcohol. The important thing to provide enough of a shock, be it pleasant or not, to jolt the individual out of the ridiculous, self-pitying state of sad-sack bastardhood.
To sum up, my latest contribution to posterity, the epithet "sad-sack bastard", refers to a previously normal and effective person reduced to a state of brooding, whining uselessness by self-pity and inaction. The epithet itself is remarkably effective as a tool to pry the person to which it applies out his or her sad-sack bastardliness (see "Interjection") or as a cautionary device to ward off the unwary individual skirting dangerously close to its treacherous and rocky shores.
It's incredibly useful.
The ancient Greeks used a literary device called an epithet, in which a hyphenated phrase is linked to a noun, with examples being "wine-dark sea", "rosy-fingered dawn", and my personal favorite, "ox-eyed Hera".
Inasmuch as my colleagues (read: Mark and my brother) and I have always tried to emulate the ancient Greeks (mostly in our fondness for spears), we came up with our own epithet, "sad-sack bastard". It's an incredibly useful and versatile epithet, and in the last few years we came up with many ways to work it into our daily conversations.
Unlike many other phrases in the English language, the epithet "sad-sack bastard" works equally well as several different parts of speech.
Noun -"Quit being a sad-sack bastard."
Proper noun - "Well, look, Mr. Sad-Sack Bastard decided to grace us with his presence"
Adjective - "That's a sad-sack bastard thing to say."
Verb - "Stop sad-sack bastarding around."
Interjection "Hey! Sad-sack bastard!"
A sad-sack bastard, if you couldn't pick it up with the context clues, is not a desirable thing. Depending on the situation, a sad-sack bastard can be found brooding in his or her (it's gender neutral, another plus) room, listening to depressing music or obsessively pursuing meaningless goals in video games, ignoring the well-meant and potentially correct advice of friends and family, and generally refusing to directly interact with his or her problems.
The sad-sack bastard is not depressed. They may, at one point, have been depressed, for completely valid reasons, but those reasons and that depression no longer excuse their behavior. Neither is the sad-sack bastard put-upon. Again, they may have been at one point, but now they are either exaggerating the situation or needlessly prolonging it through their own inaction. The sad-sack bastard, it cannot be stressed strongly enough, is not to be pitied. They are playing up the unfortunate circumstances of the recent past to addressing the problems of the present or future.
The only way to stop the sad-sack bastard in your life, or yourself, if you happen to be in that unhappy situation, from sad-sack bastarding around, generally bringing the local populace down, is to force them to directly engage with the issues they or you have retreated from into the grim land of sad-sack bastard. I have always favored yelling as de-sad-sack bastarding tool, but other parties have also tried cuddling, reasoned discourse, lavish gifts, slapping, or the forced administration of alcohol. The important thing to provide enough of a shock, be it pleasant or not, to jolt the individual out of the ridiculous, self-pitying state of sad-sack bastardhood.
To sum up, my latest contribution to posterity, the epithet "sad-sack bastard", refers to a previously normal and effective person reduced to a state of brooding, whining uselessness by self-pity and inaction. The epithet itself is remarkably effective as a tool to pry the person to which it applies out his or her sad-sack bastardliness (see "Interjection") or as a cautionary device to ward off the unwary individual skirting dangerously close to its treacherous and rocky shores.
It's incredibly useful.
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