‘Fast’ Food

How long should this take?

I don’t ask much of  fast food. I only ask that, in fact, it be fast.

I don’t expect that this kind of meal to be either satisfying or nutritious. Frankly, I don’t even expect it to be food. If they’re serving me an amalgamation of processed chicken lips bound together with some kind of recycled and reconfigured (though deliciously flavoured) cardboard mash…well, it’s my choice to eat it. But they’d better get it to the counter in a hurry, that’s all I have to say.

Yesterday, in the middle of the afternoon, I walked into a fast food joint (something relatively rare for me) and became quietly agitated at the pokey service. These people were slow. And there was barely anyone in the place. I don’t know if they speed up during peak periods but I doubt it. I watched one employee methodically delaminating a stack of cheese slices and her pace was positively Darwinian. The clock is always ticking for me in any kind of lineup. These folks finally got the food to me mere moments before my discontent became verbal.

There is a famous family incident where I once lost my temper at a fast food restaurant. It was at one of the ‘biggies’ and it must have been at the end of a particularly frustrating day but the slowness of service caused me to crack…right at the counter. I launched into a Shakespearean-like plea to surrounding patrons. “How can they call this fast food?”, I projected clear through to the dishwashing pit. “I could have gone home and cooked myself a fine meal in the time it has taken you people to scrape together this pathetic excuse for sustenance!”. My wife, who was standing beside me, was mortified. I believe she tried to ‘shush’ me…which only increased my agitation. ‘This is not fast food”, I continued. “This is slow food. If I’d wanted the benefits long cooking, I coud have stayed home with my crock pot!” The manager..probably someone named Skipper..was unable to douse the flame of my frustration. I stomped out of the place (still hungry) much to the relief, I’m sure, of the staff and the everlasting embarrassment of my spouse.

If you work in the fast food industry you should be hustling. It’s as simple as that. Get it out there hot and get it out there in the here and now. Don’t ever let the customer catch you sleeping. And the standard should be that if it takes more than 5 minutes before the food (or what passes for it) is in my hands and into my mouth….I get it for free.

Somehow I don’t see a franchise in my future.

Off The Grid

Run silent, run free

Two years ago, when I moved to Toronto for a job, I was mandated to carry a cellphone for the first time in my life. Prior to that, it had become a personal challenge (and no small point of peculiar pride) that I was able to live without this most intrusive of technological crutches for as long as I did.

My sons did not understand my reluctance. ‘How can you work in broadcasting and not have a cellphone?”, they’d ask. “Are you Amish?”

After I was given a company cellphone I fought the almost inevitable reliance..the addiction…that comes with feeling constantly connected. I did not want to be one of those guys you see texting on a beach in Maui. I did not want the gnawing anxiety that comes with cyber-separation.

At the end of last month, after giving notice at my job, I left Toronto and returned to my family home on the west coast. And I have yet to reconnect the cellphone. I don’t miss it. I really don’t.

I don’t expect anyone who has grown up in a world that now operates by its thumbs to want it any other way. But there are some of us who savour a memory of a life free of sudden vibration and irritating ditties. When you went home from work…you actually went home from work. You didn’t carry it with you. You were not always available to the boss…and if you happened to be the boss, you were not always ‘on call’. Frankly, no one has ever paid me enough to command my attention (even remotely) for 24 hours a day. On the other hand, I’ve never been the boss.

I will probably have to fire up the cellphone again..perhaps, sooner than I’d really like. I may not quite be done with the workaday world. We’ll see. But the last couple of weeks have been consumed with toiling around my home…including long hours spent in the garden. There are only humming bees and gurgling fountains out there amid the roses and calla lilies and delphiniums. It’s hard to imagine that just two weeks ago the cellphone was the first thing I looked at when I awoke and the last thing I saw before sleep.

You tell me what’s the better way to live.

Having a Field Day

Where winners abound !

I walked by a huge university athletic complex today where hundreds of school kids were , literally, having a field day. It must have been thrilling for them. They were standing on a professional track..perfectly maintained, meticulously marked..listening to the public address announcer call out the names of the participating schools while their classmates cheered them on from the stands. Who wouldn’t feel great in such an environment? Who wouldn’t feel like a champion?

Contrast this to the ’field day’ for those of us who grew up in the 1960′s. It wasn’t bad enough that you were just trying to grind out the school year to get to summer vacation…but, at the 11th hour, you were now subjected to humiliation on the unforgiving field of athletic competition. Understand, folks…there were no ribbons for just showing up in those days. These were dark and primitive times when the world…even for children…was actually full of winners and losers. Losers!!! Those lousy Field Days can stick with you for life.

I hated Field Day..or Athletic Day…or Let’s Humiliate the Awkward Kids Day…whatever you wanted to call it. We never competed in some fancy schmancy arena. You walked out to a scrubby piece of the playground where you were always being picked last for a team and , just 24 hours earlier , some bigger kid had given you an atomic wedgie.

I was not an athletic child. Thus, I never collected one ribbon on Field Day. Some of my classmates were festooned like George S. Patton by the time the bell finally rang in the afternoon. I couldn’t even get the Hop, Skip and Jump right. Nobody gives you a thumb’s up for a Hop, Jump and a Skip. You can hurt yourself that way!

No, I kept in shape by being sarcastic with bullies..and then trying to outrun them. There’s an event. I called it the Survival Dash.

Field Day victors often go on to live celebrated high school lives. They excel in sports which places them in a much higher social circle than , say , kids who are in the tropical fish club. But here’s a warning to Field Day aficionados. Mind that you don’t peak too early in life. By the time I had worked in television a couple of decades,  I was contacted by a former Field Day victor..one of those kids who snubbed me as he rose through the ranks…collecting laurel wreaths and dating all the best girls.

He called me up to ask if I remembered him (I did) and I discovered that his post-highschool existence had been beyond banal. Gone were the adoring crowds. His ribbons had faded with time. I think he was selling cemetery plots.

If you give life enough time, it’ll level that damn playing field.

This Bud’s not for Me

You’ll go blind!

Well, here’s a rant.

If I have one more person wearing earbuds walk into me, I’m going to lose my business. You’ll read about it in the back pages, ‘Broadcaster goes Ballistic over Buds‘.

What the hell is wrong with people?  It’s as if they stick these things in their eyes, not their ears. I understand the joy of being swept up in your music but, come on folks! You’re in a public space. You still have have a civic duty to watch where you’re going.

I’m certainly narcissistic enough to believe that they may be targeting me directly. I see someone coming toward me with wires dangling from their head, doing that kind of bizarrely detached, head-bobbing mambo that Earbud People do, and I know…I absolutely know they’re  going to bump into me…or at least awkwardly avoid the collision at the very last second.

Earbud People not only lose their peripheral vision but ,as they drop their forward stare to connect fully with their digital funk, everything straight ahead seems to go blank as well. There must be a name for this. I thought that if you deprived a person of one critical sense it would somehow heighten the remaining levels of awareness. Not so much. Clearly, if you over-stimulate what’s going on in your ears…your eyes fall by the wayside.

Earbud People are already at risk in traffic. If you’re going to be wiped out by a bus, you’d better hope the last thing you’re listening to is really enjoyable. I’d pick Beethoven’s Egmont Overture or anything by Vince Guaraldi.

It’s a war out there. In the subway. On the sidewalk. It’s the Earbud People versus me. And I see them. I see them all. The question is, do they ever see me?

Two Friends

Old friends

Two friends on my mind…one was as old as the hills, the other recently discovered. Both, at this stage of the game, worth quite a bit.

I had known the first for longer than any other person in my life. He was the longest-lived touchstone in my family history. He could fill in all the blanks left by my own parents, now long gone. He was a marvel. We bonded quite a bit on the water…both of us had boating firmly in the blood. There were lots of gloriously sunny days spent on a searing teak deck overlooking some of the most beautiful cruising grounds on the planet. We dined on oysters plucked right off the beach and feasted frequently on the plumpest prawns drawn up from the cool sea bottom just moments before we dropped them into a steamer. And we got into our cups pretty well too. It’s all part of the rosy glow of remembrance now. When he died last month at the age of 97, I really thought that nobody I knew had done it better. I’ll miss him, of course, but I have years of inventory in the recollection. I can summon him up when the moment suits.

The second man was encountered just a few years ago. We are both writers and, I sense, both romantics at heart. My sense of warmth though, is often buried deep beneath a crushing pile of cynicism. This man surely has been knocked about by life but he remains , perhaps, the most positive person I know. I envy his attitude. While I whinge and worry and seem resigned to the whims of fate…this friend soldiers on in a singularly straight forward fashion. He believes in himself and he believes in others. I know he thinks more of my talents than I do. That’s a very valuable thing. You’d be a fool to let a friendship like that slip.

We make the acquaintance of thousands of people over the course of our individual lives but who can tally the number of true friends on the fingers of a more than a single hand?

Two friends. One now gone, the other still in play. I thought it was important to take stock.

Bermuda still

Beautiful Bermuda

Today, quite by accident, I discovered a webcam with a view of one of my very favourite spots. The lens looks out over the Great Sound of Bermuda from the old British Navy Dockyards.

I sat there for about half an hour and watched as one of those huge cruise ships pulled away from the wharf…flags snapping in the breeze…people lining the rails in the sunshine to get one last good look at this beautiful place. And I sat there and watched it all live on my laptop from thousands of miles away. Technology really is an extraordinary thing!

This webcam also comes with astoundingly good sound….so, in a couple of months, I’m going to be calling it up after dark just so I can hear the lullaby of thousands of little tree frogs that fill the Bermudian night.

This will take me back..back to a time before there was a marriage…certainly before children were even a thought…back to a time when I had a substantial chunk of future before me. I first travelled to Bermuda with the girl I would eventually marry. We were engaged there…and returned many times. It was kind of ‘our’ spot. We made it back for our 25th anniversary. Today is our 31st..and I wish like hell that we were there right now!

Bermuda is a magical place. It is stuck out in the Atlantic….too far south to be truly temperate and yet too far north to be part of the tropics. It’s a hybrid and the nearness of the Gulf Stream gives it a wonderful climate. It is still a good deal British-to-the-bone. If you go out for dinner to a good restaurant, a gentleman should wear a jacket. Some might find that stuffy. I find it admirable.

When my beautiful bride-to-be and I first arrived on the island we did all the kooky, youthful things you would expect of kooky youths. We hopped aboard a moped and spent our days zooming all over the place. (on the opposite side of the road, I might add) We went scuba diving…even though we’d never been scuba diving before. I chased a guy who stole my wallet off the beach. We wound up in the hospital after being rolled in the surf over some jagged coral. In short, we took risks…the kind of risks that responsible married people with children don’t take.  And we had a blast! When we went back to Bermuda 25 years later we took the bus..not the moped. Somehow we had become bus people. Whatever happened to those kooky youths? Boy, I miss them sometimes.

Have you ever stepped off a plane in a place you’ve never been and felt instantly at home? You are suddenly, inexplicably comfortable in totally unfamiliar surroundings. That’s what Bermuda was like for me. I don’t know what that is, but when it happens it leaves an imprint upon your soul.

We all need our places in the sun.

Something in the Air

I am now, well and truly, a man of mass transit. I am not far from the madding crowd. I’m in the madding crowd. I’m just another guy on a bus…a part of the great daily ebb and flow. I’m right there getting whacked with backpacks, run over by strollers and body-checked by people who can’t keep their balance. What a joy! Sometimes it feels like I’m in a Fellini film.

There is a never a shortage of reading material on mass transit. There are warnings and admonitions wherever you can stick a sticker. Complete Human Rights Codes have been posted because some people, in close quarters,  have been known to get more than a little cranky. Most of these signs are lost to my mind’s eye but the other day I saw a something I had truly never seen before. There, among all the printed pleas to move back, be courteous and don’t push on this or that was a hygiene prompt.

Please Wear Deodorant.

Really? We need a public reminder to use a stick, roll-on or spray? There’s no doubt that some people, out there in the great olfactory soup, can be, what one of my uncles used to call,  a little ‘hummy’. But I have always cut those folks some slack (if I don’t outright attempt to manoeuvre away). I figure nobody, given the choice, really wants to smell bad. It must be one of the great miseries of life to develop that kind of nuclear body odour.

We live in a super-sensitized society. Nobody , for example, wants to smell the slightest waft from a fine cigar. There are people who want to rid the world of perfume. I think it’s a joy to smell perfume on a woman…others, apparently, break out in a rash. If you open a peanut butter sandwich in the wrong crowd , someone will call out the HazMat team.

So I was a little stunned to see the advocacy of deodorant right out there in plain sight. The icon shows a red line through the stick man with his arm up holding a passenger strap. What does that mean? Does that indicate that if you  haven’t used deodorant you are prohibited from putting your arm out at a right angle? Do we want smelly people losing their balance in the crowd? Isn’t that a bigger risk.

I’m still not convinced that sticker wasn’t a gag. Somebody found it in a joke store and slapped it on. Still…it did look somewhat official.

What’s next on the hygiene campaign? We’ll see signs soon that say, Please Brush Your Teeth. Change your Underwear. Have You Thought About Waxing?

We’ve got enough shackles in this civilization. If you forget your deodorant one day…it’s okay. You can come and sit beside me. (for  3 stops)