Month: June 2015

Wal-Mart Thinks We’re All Criminals

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I am not a crook.

Just as a rule, I don’t break laws. That may put me in the minority, especially if you consider traffic violators to be lawbreakers (by the way, the days when cars will automatically drive us where we need to be cannot get here fast enough for me. I firmly believe that driving, like the internet, somehow brings out the worst in people just by its very nature), but I take some pride in being a guy who follows rules, does what’s meant to be done, and by and large and as often as I can, considers the people around him when making a decision.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that I look about as likely to go on a crime spree as to spontaneously break into a ballet dance, Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries think I’m a criminal.

I mean, they must, right? Because I can’t exit their establishment with any amount of goods in my possession without displaying my receipt. It’s been that way at Sam’s Club for a while, but today it happened at the regular old Wal-Mart as well.

Yeah, I know, here I go again with the first-world problems, and this is me making a big gripe over a really minuscule inconvenience, but I’m not so sure it’s minuscule.

Let me be clear: I don’t mind proving that I bought and paid for the things I’m carrying out of the store. That’s fine. What I mind is being detained (let’s not split hairs here, you get stopped on your way out the door while they “check your receipt”) for no other reason than that the store has to double-check and make sure I’m not stealing from them.

Because that’s what they’re doing. There’s really no other way around it. Checking your receipt at the exit isn’t designed to make sure you have the everything you paid for, it isn’t designed to safeguard the nutritional value of the food you’re buying for your family, it isn’t even designed to create jobs for retirees and veterans — that’s just a byproduct (though the fact that they have to take jobs like this is a subject for another post, probably too depressing for me to cover here). No, the business of checking your receipt is designed to ensure that you aren’t walking out with stuff you didn’t pay for.

In other words, that person at the door is there to say to you, “let me make sure you didn’t forget to pay for something,” which is another way of saying, “let’s make sure you aren’t a dirty, stuff-taking thief,” all while they (hopefully) smile at you and (sometimes) wish you a nice day.

And I get it. People steal stuff. Some people steal a lot of stuff. The whole self-checkout thing is throwing a wrench into the works, whether it’s the way forward or not, and there have to be some safeguards in place to make sure people aren’t taking advantage. A company’s within their rights to protect their property through reasonable means (reasonable, I guess, would be an action short of shooting you in the kneecap if you accidentally stuff a bottle of salad dressing into your pocket because your kid started having a fit in the store and you needed both hands on him to wrangle him and usher him out of the store in a hurry, forgetting to pay for the bottle of salad dressing in the process, NOT THAT THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO ANYBODY AROUND HERE *whistles*), and having a person there to check what you’re walking out of the door with certainly isn’t an invasion of privacy or a denial of your human rights. I’m not about to stage a sit-in because a low-wage employee came at me with a highlighter. But does that mean that the company has to operate under the assumption that everybody is a criminal?

It makes me feel icky about shopping there. It’s hard to look past the subtext: “we check everybody’s receipt because everybody is potentially a criminal.” I don’t care how nice the shopping experience is otherwise (and let’s be clear, I’m not saying it is — Sam’s Club is routinely home to the longest and slowest lines I’ve ever seen in retail, and Wal-Mart is… well, let’s just say there’s an entire website dedicated to the ridiculous/sad/terrifying/I-don’t-want-to-live-on-this-planet-anymore experience that is shopping at your local Wal-Mart), the fact that this retailer is silently accusing me of petty theft every time I pass through their doors kinda makes me not want to shop there.

So, for the most part I don’t. Trips to Sam’s and Wally World are few and far between for us these days, for this among other reasons. But every time I check out, and I see people blithely handing over their receipts, I have to wonder if anybody is really thinking about what’s going on there, if they really consider the fact that the retailer they’re giving their hard-earned dollars to silently and discreetly considers them a possible thief just by virtue of having bought something there.

And there’s the fargo’ed up thing. If you walk out ostensibly empty-handed, you don’t get stopped. So I — having just stood in line for fifteen minutes waiting for a dead-in-the-eyes twenty-something to ring up my economy-sized jar of pickles and twenty-pound sack of potatoes and shambling toward my car while carrying a baby in one hand and holding the hand of my three-year-old in the other, and pushing the cart with my third hand OH WAIT I DON’T HAVE A THIRD HAND, I’m doing all this with only the two hands I was born with — I get stopped to have my receipt checked. But the guy who came in, stuffed a couple of fishing rods down his pants legs, a few astonishingly priced shirts under his armpits, a bunch of grapes under his hat and a half dozen batteries up his ass, and then walked out empty-handed because he “didn’t find what he was looking for” doesn’t get smiled at, doesn’t get a highlighter waved in his direction, and in fact goes on to rob the very store that’s giving me such a hard time for shopping there with an ease I can only dream of.

This is our world. Wal-Mart thinks we’re all crooks, but man, just look at those prices! I guess they can think what they want…

The Summer Rhythm

Pavowski1 Comment

Teaching is weird.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great; having those two months off during the summer is fantastic, and it’s enviable to people who don’t work in education. (It’s maybe the only enviable thing about the job, but hey, you take what you can get.) And I’m certainly not complaining about the time off: that time translates into lots of opportunities to sleep in, go running during earthly waking hours (during the working months I’m out there before the sun is up, which has its own sort of ethereal calm about it but also sorta makes me feel like a vampire  — NO I MUST AVOID THE SUN), be a dad who’s actually present in his kids’ and his wife’s lives, check out some horrible daytime television.

Problem is, when I’m working, I have this routine, and over the summer, that routine is shattered. Not just shattered, but then stomped on by little toddler feet and flung at my face by little toddler hands and then not only do I have to deal with the shards of shattered routine embedded in my corneas, I also have to stop the toddler and the infant from swallowing the broken pieces and…

By the way, can you still call a three-year-old a toddler? It seems idiotic to do so, all of a sudden, since “toddlers” are named for their toddling, that wobbly, baby-goat stumbling gait that’s the hallmark of an uncoordinated, top-heavy biped learning to walk. But sprout #1 is well past wobbling. He can still lose his balance and go crashing into a table edge or fall down the last stairs, bouncing off like he’s made of rubber, but when it comes to walking, running, galloping, skipping… I mean, he’s mastered it. So he’s not toddling anymore, but what is he? Still too little to be a boy, I think. Is there a word for that? Fargo, the kid is going to be in preschool next year. Look, let’s just dial the clocks back a little bit…

Okay, enough of that sentimental diversion. (Seriously, though. Kids grow up FAST.) I was talking about routines and how over the summer my routine breaks down worse than my old Chevy Malibu (god rest its hunk-of-junk soul). I’m trying to find the routine for getting my writing done over the summer, because even though my 9-5 job is on a little hiatus, the writing dream NEVER SLEEPS, and its hungry maw must be fed a steady diet of word count, despair and whiskey.

Nice thing about doing my writing on and around the job is, there’s structure there. Typical work day: Wake up, exercise, get to work, do the teacher thing for four hours, break for lunch, write for about thirty minutes while pounding down a salad or a sandwich, do a lightning session of grading papers and planning the next day’s lessons, and write for another fifteen minutes or so before my last class of the day comes in. Patterns. Regularity. You can plan for that and the body adapts nicely to it, not unlike it adapts nicely to a bowl of raisin bran in the morning and a visit to the crapper in the afternoon. Easy to plan your day that way.

Over the summer, there’s no such luck. One day, my wife’s at work, so I’ve got the kids for nine hours, then a spot of cleaning and cooking in the evening, then it’s time for a glass of wine with a nice TV show in the evening, and then, whoops — it’s bedtime again. (Here my wife is rolling her eyes: “I still find time to get things done!” and that’s true, honey, you do. But you have superpowers, and I don’t, and it’s virtually impossible to maintain the focus needed to hold a narrative together when you’re constantly stopping to make sure the sprouts aren’t devouring a bucket full of chalk, or shaving the cats, or trying to feed your lunch to the dog, or taking markers apart to see how they work and then smearing the magic ink on their faces, or pretending to be dinosaurs and stomping all over creation and, again, eating everything in sight.) Next day, wife’s home, but we’re prepping for a yard sale. One minute we’re taking sprout #1 to Grandma’s house for the day, next minute we’re hauling stuff out of the garage, next minute we’re hauling stuff into the garage, a bit later on I’m off to the Home Depot to get some cleaning supplies, then it’s more sorting and prepping and cleaning and don’t forget changing sprout #2’s diaper and keeping her from sticking her fingers in it as you do so (her new favorite habit, and there go my wife’s eyes again because I think she actually cleaned more diapers today… again, she’s just better than me at handling that stuff promptly, whereas I’m maybe better at letting things be), then holy carp it’s time to put sprout #2 to bed and hey did we eat yet, no we probably should so it’s time to cook and whoops the sun is down, hey let’s go to bed. Which is a fine day, very productive and all, until I realize about 9pm SHARKNADO I forgot to write today.

Do you let it slip? Or do you gird your loins for battle and go in to do battle with the Word Monsters when all you really want to do is go to sleep to prepare yourself for the unpredictability that tomorrow will surely bring?

Problem is, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, momentum matters. I know that if I let the writing slip today, it’s twice as easy to let it slip again tomorrow (well, I missed one day this week, what’s one more — I can rest up and hit it properly next week), and so on and so forth until whatever dubious progress I’ve managed in this little endeavor is lying in a twisted heap at the bottom of the chasm, smoke pouring from its innards as I crawl toward the couch for a nap.

Anyway, I’m looking for that rhythm, that pattern that will let me get my writing done during these oddball summer months without feeling like I’m taking away time from the wife and kids. And yeah, I know these are totally first world problems, and I own that. But, privileged problems or no, when there are things throwing your life out of balance, I think it’s worth slowing down a little bit to see if you can work toward restoring that balance, rather than just riding it out. We humans, we seek the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, nothing worth having is easy.

So, the question: when your regular routine is thrown off, how do you make sure you get everything done? Technically I have more time than ever in my days now, but it feels like those hours just slip away.

The Unholy Sands

Pavowski6 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week: the Random Title Challenge. Always fun when it rolls around.

This challenge finds me just back from vacation at the beach, and it was a little hard to shake that from my mind, so rather than fight it, I used the image that stuck in my mind when I drew my title as the central gag in the story. Maybe it works.

The Unholy Sands

“I’m just not sure I see the need.”

Larry didn’t even hesitate, but launched into the next tier of his pitch. “See, that’s the thing. You don’t see the need, nobody sees the need. Your average vampire can overmatch a human without breaking a sweat, let alone a fine specimen such as yourself. Which is why this is the perfect weapon.” He pushed the bullet-sized glass vial into the vampire’s hand.

The vampire stared at the vial as if it were full of elk piss. “What does it do, exactly?”

“Good question. Fair question. So. The humans, right? Sure, some of them are accepting of your kind, some of them will even offer you a little of their blood if they’re really friendly. I know a few people like that, and I’m sure you do, too. I’ve even shared a bit of my own from time to time.” It was a lie, but not the biggest one he had in his bag.

Despite himself, the vampire found himself nodding along with Larry.

“But those are the good ones. Now, I don’t need to tell you that there are more than a handful of humans out there who would just as soon stake somebody like you as look at you, am I right? And these people,” he let his mouth curl around the word for disdain, and inwardly ticked a box on his mental list as he saw the vampire’s lips curl up likewise, “they have basements full of every tool they can possibly use in the fight against your kind. Closets full of wooden stakes. An armoire full of crosses. Boxes and boxes of silver bullets. I heard about a guy who became ordained on the internet so that he could bless all the water that came into the house, right there at the water main. Can you imagine? Invited a vampire over, had his wife spill some barbecue sauce on the guy’s face, offered to let him wash up, and blammo. Undead soup all over the bathroom floor.” It was a story spruced up from the truth through a hundred retellings, and it had the desired effect.

The vampire couldn’t help himself. “Ugh.”

“You’re damned right, ugh. Now, I could show you an arsenal of anti-human weaponry, and trust me, I’ve got some things in here that would make your cold heart skip a few beats.” Larry patted his sharkskin wheeled travel bag for emphasis, disguising the subtle click from within. “But there’s no need, because that right there, in your hand, is the crown jewel. May I?” He held out his hand to the vampire, watching for the sign of hesitation that would tell him the vampire was interested. It was tough to spot with vampires, but there it was, a flicker of doubt as he pressed the vial back into Larry’s hand. “Notice how it refracts the light from even the most meager of sources.” Larry held the vial aloft against the backdrop of the vampire’s moth-dingy porch light, and stepped back for full effect.

The shadow that Larry cast onto the front lawn stretched and expanded as you might expect from a solitary light source, but swirling around his shadow’s hand — the hand holding the vial — was an aura of swirling, contorting, faintly whispering blackness, blacker than the night or Larry’s shadow or the insides of the vampire’s eyelids. A hushed storm raging in the air about his hand.

The vampire blinked in shock, glancing from Larry’s hand, which grasped a seemingly harmless glass vial, to Larry’s shadow, which seemed to hold a pulsating orb of living darkness. “What is it?”

“Humans have their holy water,” Larry said. “Vamps have the Unholy Sands of Kelep’Met.” Larry held his breath for a moment. His last sale had been thwarted when his target had turned out to be something of an enthusiast in Egyptian lore, pointing out that Larry had mispronounced the word. He’d been lucky to escape with his life. This vampire, however, possessed no such knowledge, and simply gaped in accepting wonder.

Larry pressed on, edging closer to the vampire, though every instinct in him told him to keep his distance. Vamps might have been in the open, and most thought (rightly) that they had nothing to fear from humans, so they didn’t bother hurting people. But that didn’t mean you could trust them, and the illusion wouldn’t last long. “Far back, before recorded histories, before the dawn of the undead, great and terrible gods roamed the earth. One of them, Kelep’Met, drew the ire of his brothers for his devotion to the dark side of mankind, his demands for human sacrifice, his depraved games in which he would slaughter men in droves just to sate his evil lust for blood. His brothers met him in the darkest recesses of the earth and slew him, and there his blood seeped into the earth and mingled with it. This sand,” and here Larry held the vial out once more for the vampire to take, “is imbued with the darkest forces of evil that the world has ever known.”

The vampire’s eyes were locked on the little glittering capsule, icy orbs in an expressionless face. When he accepted the vial this time, he cradled it in his fingers, as if it might explode if turned the wrong way. Without warning, those cold globes snapped to Larry and he felt the frozen daggers of the vampire’s stare slice into his mind. “Tell me what it does.” The voice echoed in Larry’s head as if the night had parted and God himself had whispered in his ear.

Every pore opened, every hair stood on end, and he even felt a little tingle between his legs. Larry’s blood had been replaced with lava. The vampire’s spell would draw from him the truth, and the gig would be up. Already he could feel his mind spilling his secrets like an uncorked whiskey barrel, the thoughts cascading over one another in their rush toward his lips.

Worst it will do is annoy them, like sand at the beach. Get it down their shorts if you really want to give them a hard time. Or throw it in their eyes.

Kelep’Met is just some name I made up ‘cause I thought it sounded crazy and ominous.

Don’t look in my briefcase, it’s empty except for some silver bullets, some stakes, and the projector that makes the crazy shadows that fool saps like you into thinking this bullshit is legit.

But just as the damning truth began to rattle the air in his throat, the heart rate monitor in his ear registered the effects of the glamour and fired an eardrum-piercing shriek in his head, shattering the effect of the spell. He wanted to scream from the sound but kept his face slack, empty, a good little hypnotized monkey.

“Just let a few grains touch them, and it’ll feel like acid is burning away their skin, then their muscles, then their skeleton, like a bad acid trip they can’t wake up from. I’ve seen people tear their own flesh to ribbons trying to rid themselves of the curse. The ones that survive suffer in pain for the rest of their lives.”

Those seeking eyes flashed across his face once more, and then the vampire smiled, a horrible mask of fangs and handsome death. “How much?”

Larry licked his lips. “Twenty grand.”

The vampire smirked and then flickered — that damn moving-faster-than-the-eye-can-see thing they do — appearing now with a fat wad of bills in his hand. “I assume one such as yourself would prefer to deal in cash.”

It was Larry’s turn to grin. “Cash is great.”

Larry tucked his newly-acquired stacks of hundreds into his sport coat, then reached out for the vampire’s hand. The lifeless, chilling grasp — like shaking hands with a statue — never failed to turn his stomach, but he swallowed back the bile and smiled his winningest smile. It was easy enough, imagining the vampire’s shock and subsequent rage when he tried to inflict untold suffering on a human only to discover that Larry had taken him for a ride and vanished in the wind. He almost laughed. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“The pleasure is mine,” the vampire grinned, his dazzling eyes flashing in the night.

Larry turned and shuffled off. The morning would dawn in a few hours, and there were a hot handful of vampires in this neighborhood. Just a few more sales and he’d have the scratch to buy his way to Borra Borra, where the less politically correct natives still did the proper thing and staked any filthy bloodsucker on sight.

Surfing, Crawling, or Riding the Cosmos

Pavowski11 Comments

socs-badge

The prompt for the week is “information” over at Stream of Consciousness Saturday. And technically the goal of the prompt is to engage with it spending as little time in planning as possible, but rather to dive in and just let the mind wander. Still, I couldn’t help noodling on this one for much of the day: while mowing the grass, while walking around with the kids in the stroller, while sitting on the crapper… at first it seemed so small, so insignificant a topic, such a minute and overspecific little thing, what could I possibly write about it? But the more I thought, the bigger it got, until it struck me rather like a 50lb sack of concrete tossed from the flatbed of a rusted-out Nissan on the freeway, generally fargoing up my mental vehicle and much of my worldview: information is everything.

That’s not metaphorical, of course. From a scientific standpoint, everything in the universe is simply a collection of information. This particle occupies this space relative to that other particle, and as a result this atom shifts into this alignment within this molecule, and because of the presence of said molecule, proteins can form, and with the preponderance of those proteins come cells and body structures and blood and bone and brains and everything else that makes us us. The tiniest deviations from the blueprints are all that make up the myriad differences between not just humans, but chimps, fish, trees, and the very earth we walk on (my sorry-not-sorry apologies to the creationist lot). And given enough time, money, and concern, those differences — that stream of information that makes us who we are — could possibly be chronicled. And that’s something.

But it doesn’t stop there. The movement of the heavens is relayed to us through information; much more so than simply the information we’re able to decode with our flimsy senses. Satellites capture the movement of one star past another, the bend in the gravitational field of a planet illuminated by the slowing of the light around it, the Doppler effect of interstellar debris, and translate this — this stew of raw information indecipherable to all but maybe a tenth of a hundredth of a thousandth of a percent of us — to paint the picture of our known universe, even looking back through time itself to map out what the universe was like in its primordial state.

And then, of course, there’s information in the traditional sense: the information that we doddering bipeds build our world around, the collection of the relative movements of the species across the face of our particular bit of space rock that cause economies to rise and fall, forces at war to invade or withdraw, and a million other decisions to swing this way or that in a flicker of firing synapses. Information drives the world, and that information has to come from somewhere for it to make me decide whether to get up off the couch to get another drink, or sit and suffer with a dry mouth while I watch another episode of Aquarius (which I’m not sure if I care for yet).

The internet. Right? When we say “information,” that’s where it comes from, for most of us. In the Western world, at least, if you’re getting your information from anywhere, odds are that it passed through a computer on its way to your face holes, if your own personal computer wasn’t the last stop. An interview conducted over Skype. Documents e-mailed from a presidential candidate’s personal, totally-legal-no-matter-what-anybody-says server. A record of purchases that you may or may not have made from websites of dubious repute. Whether it be legitimate information, ill-guided misinformation, or maliciously-intended disinformation, there’s a flood of it coming at us through the internet all the time.

So I took a pause from writing and googled one of those questions that I felt very dumb typing into a search engine: “how much information is on the internet?” And I ended up trying to grasp what I found on the wikipedia page: Exabyte. An exabyte is a million terabytes, or a billion gigabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is one of those numbers — like the size of the universe — that your brain just sort of goes fuzzy thinking about. And estimates in 2010 showed that in a month, about 21 exabytes of information are passed along the internet. A MONTH.

And for all that, it’s estimated that a single gram of DNA could contain over 450 exabytes of information. So if you think those construction instructions from Ikea are complicated, well…

Now, your sources might differ from mine, and I’m not here to pass judgment on what sort of information you invite into your home (though given the size of, for example, the anti-vaxxer movement, some of you are receiving and believing some decidedly poor information). I’m only here to ponder the ramifications of such a system, and I will do so vis-a-vis a surprising moment we had driving home from the beach yesterday.

I pulled into a gas station in rural Alabama and swiped my card at the pump. I received an error message telling me to see the attendant.

Frustrated, I pulled to another pump (kids were in the car and there was no sense unloading them, and god knows you can’t leave them in the car on a hot day in Alabama) and got the same result. I called my wife on her cell phone (a fantastic tool for delivering information, and a little ironic if you’ll bear with me) where she was standing in line to buy some snacks for the road and asked her to check with the attendant.

Turns out, the gas station runs its internet connection on dialup, and the phone line was in use at the moment.

Now, there’s two funnies in this situation from where I stand.

First is that a business in the Western world is still operating off of a dialup connection. (Actually, first is that dialup connections are still offered at all, let alone to businesses.) But then, that’s Alabama for you, I guess. (My apologies to any readers from Alabama, except you already live in Alabama, so my apologies won’t help you.)

Second is that a person was using a phone that wasn’t in his pocket or in any other way connected to the internet. I thought we’d moved past that as a society, but you learn something new every day.

Point is, there is a literal uncountable ocean of information flowing in, around, and through us every instant of every day. Some of us simply ride the wave faster than others.

Again, my apologies to the readers from Alabama.

On Leave

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Communications may be somewhat interrupted this week, because this is the view that I’m waking up to:

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We arrived Saturday, and will be back later this week. It is perfect summer weather here in Florida, with the scorching sun overhead during the day giving way to cool breezes in the evening. Absolutely ideal for washing the school year off. Not bad for inspiration either, if I could find a free minute to park my keester and bang on the laptop for a while. But if you have kids, you know that a free minute on vacation is a little like a Bigfoot sighting: gone the moment you realize it’s there, and impossible to plan for.

That said, there are few delights more satisfying than the peals of laughter and overhyped shouts of glee as your kids splash around in the ocean, root around in the sand, jump into and out of the pool, and stuff down piles of junk food. I don’t recall vacations being this much work when my parents would take my three siblings and me to the beach, but then it’s a whole different animal once you’re the one who has to care for the little monsters. Being on vacation with a toddler and an infant is almost as much work as actually being at work.

But the key word there is almost. When the sun is setting amidst a skyscape of purple clouds and temperate breezes, the kids are snoring in their beds like they’ve never slept a day in their lives (running around on the beach will do that to them), and you’ve got a lovely glass of wine and your lovelier wife next to you, it’s hard to even remember four-letter words like “work”.

So I’ll leave with this image of the most complete rainbow I’ve ever seen firsthand, because, you know, that’s happening here, now.

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Suffer.