Frozen

This isn’t about the latest hit musical from Disney. It’s about a life. A life on hold. A life, well, frozen.

U-Haul calls them rooms. I call them storage units. In them sits the difference between life before and life after the Great Recession of 2008. They’re three-dimensional barometers of the downsizing the long-term unemployed have absorbed.

Ours is filled with furniture, appliances, clothing and kitchen ware; the list goes on and on and on. These are the things my mate and I hold onto. The things we have invested with the hope that one day we will have use for again.

Call them objects of faith.

Putting them on e-Bay or giving them away or throwing them out would be to acknowledge that things aren’t going to change. And we can’t do that. Not yet.

So we pay a monthly storage fee equivalent to two tanks of gasoline (and this is with a discount from a friend who’s an employee at the facility) to indulge our fantasy. Or deny the future. I can’t figure out which.

I touch the sofa that used to be the centerpiece of our living room. Thumb the designer shirts which no longer fit because of my stress-fueled consumption of junk food. I gaze at the washing machine and drier we picked out, and wonder if they would even work after being inactive for so long.

I realize, ironically-enough, that I would actually enjoy putting a load of wash in them, if only to enjoy the significance of such an act. I also realize how unlikely this is to happen.  
Perhaps this is a tomb.

I retrieve the book I came for, pull down the metal door, secure the padlock and head to the front office where I pay the rent. 

Hope, for better or worse, springs eternal.

Waiting on a Friend

Sometimes, everything is difficult. Even your friends.

It should have been a good thing when Lucky called Sunday night. It should have been an opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives. Share a laugh. Commiserate about work and aging parents. A pause in the rat race.

But Lucky is feeling the sting of late middle-age. And with it, the realization that whatever he hasn’t done will, at this point, likely remain that way. It has its talons deep into his flesh, especially in this, the age of diminished opportunities.

While marveling at his quarter-century with a single employer, I realize it was hiding more than anything. A college degree should have been a fresh start. But there was a fear in Lucky, a fear of leaving his comfort zone and trying something new.

Despite what we say on Facebook and on Twitter, change provokes anxiety in all of us. But in Lucky’s case, it was something more. It was paralyzing. And now his sense of life having passed him by has curdled into something ugly. Anger. Rage. Jealousy.

Sunday night, it careened into finger-pointing and accusations. He brought up a long-ago dinner he paid for, a dinner I had in no way, shape or form solicited. "It's on me" he said with a casual wave of his hand.

Now I know better. It was on me—for accepting it. It made me a parasite in Lucky's eyes.

It was a shot so cheap it deserved shelf-space at Wal-Mart.

Thankfully, there's another side to the story.

Understanding is an awesome responsibility. Sometimes, it asks us to tolerate the intolerable. In this case, knowing the depths of my friend’s discontent made it difficult to respond as I normally would.

But you can only do so much. You can only listen and try to empathize and offer the hoped-for solace of shared feelings and experiences.

It's not always enough.

Like my friend, I am in many ways embittered and sour. I struggle to subvert my anger and cynicism and jealousy at those around me who I perceive to have better, more-fulfilling lives. At those who, through no fault of their own, haven’t suffered the ravages of the Great Recession to the extent I have.

But Lucky left me something. Unintentional as it was, Lucky gave me a refresher course in what we become when the worst elements of our personality get the best of us. How we sound when the howling beast of regret takes center stage.

And how we so often (and so unwittingly) can subject those who care about us most to the worst we have to offer.

It was a cold, hard look in the mirror.

And that may be the greatest gift friendship has to offer.

A Bronze Medal at the Winter Olympics

Winter supposedly ends in a few minutes. I'm here to write its obituary.

It was the third-snowiest in Chicago history. And it doesn’t matter if you use the traditional measure (the duration of the winter solstice) or the meteorological one (the period between December first and the last day of February), it snowed a lot.

This near-record snowfall was accomplished without the benefit of a single blizzard. It was through a grinding, unrelenting, inch-by-inch accumulation that its bronze medal was won. Not only did it snow a lot, but it snowed on many days.

So many, many days.

And we at the Square Peg were made corpulent with delight.

And we shouldn't forget the cold. The winter just concluded was likewise the third-coldest in our history. It stands an Olympic-like three-tenths of a degree from the record low average of 18.3 degrees Fahrenheit posted in 1903/04. It is sobering to realize that for giant stretches of time, it was warmer in the freezer.

I am grateful I did not die while shoveling snow. This because owing to the bronze medal cold, much of the bronze medal snowfall was dry. To those luxuriating in blissful ignorance of such things, a heaping shovelful of dry snow weighs much, much less than does a heaping shovelful of wet snow.

So there’s that.

But I can’t summon similar gratitude over the 2,628 times I had to scrape ice off the windows of my car. Or sweep snow from it or remove the cement-like accumulation from the wheel wells and front and rear undercarriage. Nor am I dancing a jig over the 104 additional gallons of gas I burned at $3.79 per warming it up.

The layers and layers of clothing I was forced to don every time I went outdoors and then had to remove when I returned indoors also left me distinctly unenthused. Ditto the considerable irritation I experienced while buckling my shoulder harness and seat belt in an already narrow space made narrower by bulky winter clothing.

And what of the snow and howling wind that inevitably found the exposed flesh between the end of a jacket's sleeve and the top of a glove? Or that bit between a scarf and the northern terminus of a coat’s zipper? At wind chills below ten degrees, it may as well have been a knife at your jugular.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t shine a light (preferably an LED with fresh batteries) on the bane of all calcium-deficient human beings: falling.

I myself fell several times this winter. Fortunately, nothing broke. As shippers the world over have learned, it is difficult to break something wrapped like a Ming vase about to be offloaded by longshoremen.

(Which isn't to infer that I in any way, shape or form resemble a Ming vase. Actually, I look more like a Jin Dynasty ewer.)

But as scientists point out, we do adapt. There is such a thing as acclimatization. While the thought of a post-work stroll through an open parking lot in nineteen degree weather would have been horrific in September, last week it seemed (all things being relative) balmy.

Yes, it’s true. I sauntered to my car in an unzipped coat. Carrying my gloves instead of wearing them. At the risk of diminishing my robust display of acclimatization, I should add there was no wind chill.

Combined with the two occasions this month that have seen the thermometer register a positively tropical fifty degrees and there is tangible proof that even permafrost can be rendered impermanent.

But the ice scraper isn’t going anywhere. Snow is predicted later in the week.

My obituary is premature.

My Conflicted Love

I’ve always been a car nut. In fact, I could say “car” before I mastered the two-syllable complexities of “mama”. Fortunately, I was born to a mother who, gracious by nature, forgave my misaligned priorities.

Obviously, something about the rolling sculpture of metal, glass, chrome and rubber fascinated me.

The day I discovered I didn’t possess the math and engineering skills necessary to be a car designer was probably the worst of my youth. Then why had I endured the classroom ridicule of so many teachers as I resolutely attempted to translate the cars in my imagination to paper?

This infatuation subsequently ebbed and flowed over the years, as I (in turn) discovered pop music, sports and girls. But it was never far from the surface, and reemerged in my late-twenties as strong as ever. It became conflicted as I gradually became aware of the degree to which the automobile shaped and influenced the twentieth century.

Yet my love is an egalitarian one. It encompasses everything, from old to new and up market on down. From 1929 Duesenbergs to the new three-cylinder Ford Fiesta. To my way of thinking, the Honda Accord is every bit the marvel a dazzling, futuristic concept car is.

This because the Accord fulfills its purpose in a way few things in life ever do.

But despite the perfection of its utility, there aren’t very many people who lust for the Accord. It isn’t sexy. There is no exotic racing lineage. No cache. No status. It is merely the preferred appliance of the American soccer mom. For high-status sexy, you must look to Europe: England, Germany and Italy.

BMW, Bentley, Mercedes, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Porsche and Ferrari offer status and exclusivity to their owners. Attention. Sex appeal. Validation. Ownership inspires an I-have-one-and-you-don’t sense of superiority.

But it isn’t all hand-stitched leather and finely-calibrated engines.

While the rest of us look on longingly, the owner of a Porsche 911 must cough up three-hundred-dollars for an oil change. The eager buyer of the new Porsche 918 will lay out 6K for the extravagance of a heater. 26K for “upgraded” leather. And 63K for something called liquid metal paint.

Porsche extends to prospective buyers an additional opportunity to boost its year-end earnings via the Weissach Package. What the buyer gets for a jaw-dropping 84K is the deletion of three components from the car.

That’s right. Stuff is taken off the car. For eighty-four thousand dollars.

Check-off the Weissach Package box on your order form and your sound insulation, leather upholstery and a portion of the passenger-side cooling infrastructure is removed in the interest of reducing mass.

I have just one question: is it more to remove the “upgraded” leather?

The total weight loss amounts to 90 pounds. I hope Weight Watchers is taking note. You seeing this, Slim-Fast? That’s nine-hundred and thirty-three dollars a pound.

But when you’re dropping $845,000 on a car, what’s another 84 thou? Percentage-wise, it’s like adding a GPS unit and upgraded sound to your Camry or Jeep Grand Cherokee. No biggie. Right?

Manufacturers like Porsche know intimately how desperate the well-heeled are to display their well-heeledness. The well-to-do require ever more exclusive and outrageous product, the better to stay one step ahead of the Joneses.

And brands like Porsche and Bentley and Ferrari are only too happy to charge them for it.

For those of us on the other side of the glass, we can only laugh at their desperation. While many of us would like to give it to the one-percent, it is ironic that we have Porsche to do it for us.

In this, the Age of Diminished Expectations, it’s something.

The Affordable Care Act and Me

I felt a great relief when the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2009. Despite the perception that Americans routinely enjoy the best of everything, enormous gaps existed in our health care coverage.

Health care reform happened despite the formidable efforts of the well-financed health care lobby and its employees—fear-mongering conservative congressmen who instilled images of cold-blooded death panels in the panic-prone minds of their constituents. They insisted it was the road to a socialist hell.

Somehow, government running health care would be a giant step backwards from the accountants currently in charge.

Implementation has been even more difficult. Conservatives continue to fight it at every turn, and challenge it in any court that will listen. To date, nearly four-dozen attempts have been made to repeal it. As a result, getting nationalized health care up and running has been like shooting a basketball with a gorilla hanging from your arms.

But it happened, and healthcare.gov went live in October of 2013.

Sadly, it has mostly lived down to its detractor’s predictions. The site was inoperable when it wasn’t inaccessible. Links didn’t work. Information wasn’t disseminated. There were billing snafus and miscommunications about policies and coverage. Its failures were (and remain) major news stories.

Against that larger backdrop, this is my experience. Despite initiating the application process three months ago, I remain without coverage.

I was an English major in college. That being the case, I defined ‘household’ as a group of people living at a common address. So when I encountered a request on the Medicaid application to list the members of my ‘household’, I dutifully listed the names of the three people who live with me.

The form immediately requested basic information about them as well.

Thing was, I didn’t realize the government's definition of 'household' meant only those parties seeking coverage. But given that definition, since I had already indicated I was only seeking coverage for myself, why was I even asked about my 'household'?

Perhaps the Department of Redundancy Department had nothing better to do.

I continued on my merry way, blissfully unaware of the fatal error I had committed. I clicked ‘save’ and ‘next’ like the computer savant that I am. And when I came to ‘submit’, I clicked that, too.

All done. Right?

One week later, I received a paper form requesting still-more information. Suffice to say an IRS audit would’ve been less-invasive. About the only thing it didn’t ask was the condition of my dryer's lint trap.

This, of course, ran counter to virtually everything I had been told about Medicaid. My finances and my finances only determined whether or not I was eligible. Not my lint trap (which incidentally is lint-free).

I called my local Department of Health. Then I called again. And again. And again. I called more times than Jennifer Aniston has been engaged. I left nice messages. I left not-so-nice messages. I called in the morning and I called in the afternoon.

But I suspected I wouldn’t hear from anyone anytime soon.

(Hey—you don’t suppose there’s a musical in all of this, do you?)

Then I considered an in-person visit. But I was advised the four-hour window I had before work was insufficient. And taking an unpaid day-off from what is already a low-paying, part-time job won’t ever be an option.

Then I left a message requesting an extension, thinking the extra time would allow me to correct what was obviously a simple misunderstanding. But since this required actual communication, it was like putting ‘Cubs’ and ‘World Series’ in the same sentence. 

Jean-Paul Sartre couldn’t have conjured up a more hopeless scenario. So I let the application lapse.

Shockingly, the Department of Health contacted me (by mail—things weren’t getting that shocking!) and informed me that since I hadn’t provided the requested information by the required date, my application was being denied.

OK.

Flush with the optimism of the new year and newly versed in government-speak, I submitted another application. But only after meeting with a certified, honest-to-goodness government health care representative (called a navigator) at my local library.

Of course, it took six attempts over the course of ten days before the site allowed me to complete it. I again clicked the ‘submit’ button, fully aware of the implications.

A happy message appeared, telling me that my application had been received and that I would soon be enrolled and enjoying healthcare coverage.

That was six weeks ago.

Nothing has shown up in my mail box. Nothing has shown up in my inbox. And I won’t even mention the telephone. And yet healthcare.gov tells me I am enrolled.

When I call or use the online chat function at healthcare.gov, I am alternately told my application is being processed, there is a log jam or that I simply need to call my local Department of Health office.

Yeah.

I tell them that is an act of utter futility. That I might as well attempt to calculate how many fastened buttons there are in the world at this moment versus unfastened ones.

This usually leaves them speechless.

No one can confirm exactly where I’m enrolled, or in what.

Maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Maybe I just need to research the government’s definition of ‘soon’. And ‘enrolled’.

My Favorite CDs of 2013

With my fiftieth year as a pop music consumer just completed and access to my blog regained, I shall henceforth set about naming my ten favorite albums of 2013 forthwith.

But first, a brief review.

Albums continued their sales decline, as our attention and time-challenged societies made singles their preferred mode of consumption. Retrospectives and archival live albums aimed at baby boomers continued to constitute an increasing percentage of album-length releases.

Ditto box sets and "re-imagined" re-issues, which at times seemed to endlessly recycle period albums into multi-disc extravaganzas costing hundreds of dollars.

But not all were wanton cash grabs.

My favorite box set was Fisherman’s Box, a six-disc chronicle of the protracted recording sessions which yielded the Waterboy’s 1988 LP Fisherman’s Blues. The band moves effortlessly from folk to blues to the sixties-inspired pop that Karl Wallinger specialized in after he left to form World Party.

A reviewer on Amazon called this the ‘Irish Basement Tapes’ and he wasn’t far off.

Given the magnificence of this music, you could be forgiven for wondering why the remainder of the Waterboy’s oeuvre isn’t more familiar. The vagaries of public taste, radio play and record company politics are the likely culprits (at least here in the U.S.), but whatever the Waterboy’s unfulfilled potential, Fisherman’s Box captures—however briefly—promise wildly and exuberantly fulfilled.

A tip of the hat goes to the multiple-disc edition of Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait, which shows this period to have been far-richer than some combination of Dylan and Columbia let on.

Robin Trower enjoyed a stellar solo career after leaving Procol Harum, plying Hendrix-inspired epics to rock audiences eager to continue that six-stringed ride.

State to State: Live Across America 1974 – 1980 offers an appealing cross section of live performances, including an exceptional 1974 show in Philadelphia. The inclusion of a fiery 1975 London show would make this just about perfect, but I’m not complaining.

And neither will you. It's the archival live album of the year.

In an era given to hip hop, rockified country and featherweight pop, rock refuses to die.

The following list reflects rock in all its current variants, along with examples of the rhythm and blues (admittedly of the blue-eyed variety) and country and western which flavored it along the way.

Time constraints forbid me from offering the capsule descriptions seen in years past. But I promise that all are worthy of your time and attention.


1. Big Scary – Not Art

2. White Denim – Corsicana Lemonade

3. Richard Thompson – Electric

4. Mogwai – Les Revenants Original Soundtrack

5. The Bamboos – Fever in the Road

6. Los Lobos – Disconnected in New York City

7. Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt

8. The Veils – Time Stays, We Go

9. Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell – Old Yellow Moon

10. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories


Honorable Mention:

My Darling Clementine - The Reconciliation?

My Chicago Bulls Christmas Wish

One of the things sport taught me is the meaning of words like ephemeral and ethereal. Life is fragile. And short. And that no matter how indomitable something may appear, it is often little more than smoke curling through air. It takes only a faint breeze to disturb and redirect its trajectory.

In the spring of 2011, the Chicago Bulls were a young team on the rise. They had lucked into that elusive thing called chemistry, with talented, heady players who bought into a charismatic coach’s vision of how the game should be played. All of this was cemented by the skills of a nascent superstar named Derrick Rose.

Yes, the view from northeast Illinois was mighty sweet. The Miami Heat might be the team of today, but it was very hard to believe the Bulls weren’t the team of tomorrow. Yet two and-a-half years later, the team of tomorrow looks like the woulda shoulda coulda team of yesterday.

Derrick Rose’s future as an NBA point guard is very much in doubt after successive anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus injuries. It’s hard to look at him and not see Anfernee Hardaway or Grant Hill.

Small forward Luol Deng has already expressed his intent to explore free agency, following public questioning of his toughness and commitment. Power forward Carlos Boozer, signed to an enormous contract following the Bulls failed attempts to land either LeBron James or Dwyane Wade in the summer of 2010, will likely remain, but is untradeable and on the downside of a productive career.

Gritty point guard Kirk Hinrich is feeling the effects of multiple seasons spent sacrificing his body in the name of defense, leaving center Joakim Noah and reserve forward Taj Gibson as the Bulls’ sole long-term assets.

The window of opportunity that magically opens for certain combinations of players and coaches has silently and immutably closed. Run ragged by an unceasing succession of injuries, the formerly resilient Bulls are now exhausted and overwhelmed. It is a good thing it’s Christmas.

My Christmas wish for the Bulls begins with David Robinson’s foot.

You see, David Robinson was an elite professional basketball player. He was fast, strong and agile. He was a seven-foot center who could move with the speed and quickness of a much smaller man. He single-handedly turned the San Antonio Spurs into contenders, and quickly became one of the NBA’s most dominant players.

His greatest weakness was that he possessed the physiology of a human being.

On December 23rd, 1996, while playing in just his sixth game after recovering from an off-season back injury, Robinson suffered a broken foot. This not only ended his season, but effectively ended the Spurs’ as well. Without their stellar center and small forward Sean Elliot, they nose-dived to an NBA-worst 20 and 62 record.

But with Robinson’s injury and the Spurs’ dismal 1996/97 season came a blessing: the number-one pick in the 1997 NBA draft. And with it, the Spurs chose Tim Duncan, beginning a run of sixteen straight winning seasons which includes four NBA championships.

So as this scarred and ravaged edition of the Chicago Bulls picks its way through the schedule, the prospect of a high draft pick in next year’s draft might be the silver lining in what has become a very dark cloud. I’m not advocating tanking here; just holding out a carrot amid the wreckage of what was once a contender.

Merry Christmas.