Monthly Archives: March 2008

A Yard Sale for Change

Posted on by patrickhmorris
3

 

We got into more than a few fights over this particular statue. To me, it was the embodiment of levity and summarized my family’s quirky, not to be taken too seriously, attitude. Any insults directed towards the statue were personal assaults towards me and I would defend it as if it were my child.

Situations like this are pretty common. Inanimate objects are given personal feelings and often times they take on a life of their own. That’s why we love a particular bowl, are sad to throw out an old pair of snow boots and why the most emotionally exhausting experience in the world is a yard sale.

The girl I dated in high school didn’t get my parent’s sense of humor. She thought they were weird and tacky. The predominance of her opinion was based on a piece of art my parents exhibited in the entry way. To most people, it was an almost unnoticeable little plastic statue. To her, it was a cause for concern.

The statue was a plate of spaghetti, with the noodles stretched high above the plate and wrapped around a suspended fork that looked like it had been plucked out of someone’s hand. My parents called it, in medias res, which is Latin for in the middle of things. My girlfriend, however, called it trashy, which is Latin for, “If we had kids together, your parents wouldn’t be allowed to see them.”

We got into more than a few fights over this particular statue. To me, it was the embodiment of levity and summarized my family’s quirky, not to be taken too seriously, attitude. Any insults directed towards the statue were personal assaults towards me and I would defend it as if it were my child.

Situations like this are pretty common. Inanimate objects are given personal feelings and often times they take on a life of their own. That’s why we love a particular bowl, are sad to throw out an old pair of snow boots and why the most emotionally exhausting experience in the world is a yard sale.

A yard sale is clothes you should have never purchased, tables that wobble, dressers with drawers that screech and electronics that haven’t worked for a long time. It’s a collection of things you don’t want anymore or can’t justify keeping any longer, but, since you paid good money for that rock tumbler, you want something, anything, in return.

The lead up to the yard sale can be emotionally difficult. It’s the time when you have to cut your losses and admit you’ve made poor purchases in the past. It’s the time you have to say good-bye to a piece of garbage you’ve grown emotionally attached to. Some people are better than others at this, but almost everyone has a hard time getting rid of something.

A lot of the sentimental garbage that should be yard sale bound doesn’t make it out to the lawn. Someone in the family always puts up a big enough fight to keep their broken skis they used in high school. Some of the sentimental garbage makes it out to the lawn, but it’s clearly not for sale. When I say, “not for sale,” I mean an old mug priced at $40 or a lamp placed to the side that you can’t approach without the owner making you nervous by following you.

The summer after my freshman year of college, a yard sale wasn’t a labor day event, it was my summer’s goal. The previous year I’d spent broke and I needed to make enough money to last me my entire sophomore year. I could either sell everything I owned or get a job. I opted to sell everything because it simply didn’t fit in with my life anymore.

Like most kids who return home after a year away from the nest, I felt like I had completely changed. I was a new man. I was surprised anyone could recognize me. I thought, ‘Don’t they see that I’ve experienced so much? Can’t they see how I’m wearing my hair now?! Doesn’t that say EVERYTHING!!’

The combination of making a few bucks and cleansing myself of my former junk yielded an obvious solution – the mother of all yard sales. Everything had to go. Nothing I owned seemed to fit in with my new, sophisticated and mature lifestyle.

I convinced my entire family to join in and Labor Day weekend, we had ourselves a yard sale.

The first lesson I learned about yard sales is that some people show up early. People show up so early, I’d have to imagine their thought process goes like this:

“The Morris’s yard sale starts at 9:00 a.m.…which means all the good stuff will be gone by 8:00…which means the people who will try to beat the early birds will get there at 7:00, so I should get there at 4:00.”

My first sale of our 9:00 a.m. yard sale was a bedside table to a guy who said, “That’s the smallest damn thing I’ve ever seen!” at 5:43 a.m.

As I was drinking my first cup of coffee (which I didn’t like yet, but felt like faking since, “I’ve changed so much since high school!”) I transitioned from the first phase of a yard sale into the second.

In case you didn’t know, yard sales have three phases:
1.    ”This is kind of fun. Wow! I’m making money! Maybe I should have charged double.”
2.    ”I’m so bored of this. These people are disgusting. Yes, I’ll take a $.25 off that $1.25 lamp if that will make you buy it.”
3.    ”What am I going to do if I don’t sell this crap?! I’m not lugging this stuff back inside! Does that dresser say $30? It’s supposed to say $.30.”

By 12:15 I had a new rule that anyone who tried to barter was immediately banished from buying anything while people who didn’t were rewarded with getting what they’d picked out for free. It’s pretty much the worst business model for a yard sale, but I’d just spent 40 minutes with a woman who forced me to talk her through the entire yard sale. “And over here we have a set of old magazines,” I’d say. She’d poke at them, look confused and ask, “How much?” When I told her the price she would say, “Sooooollllldd,” as if announcing a game show. After showing her roughly 400 items and hearing her say, “Sooooolllldd,” 400 times she proceeded to purchase a bucket she insisted looked like an owl and nothing more.

As the afternoon came to a close, the flow of desperate garbage pickers…I mean customers, slowed to a trickle and I had a lot of time to stare at my old stuff that had meant a lot to me, but meant nothing to anyone else. I thought about the past year and how eager I was to depart from the rest of my life to exhibit how many new experiences I had had.

The one thing that had remained consistent between those times was my girlfriend, who had just arrived with her mother as a courtesy. As her mother looked around at the scattered remnants of the yard sale, I told my girlfriend about the guy who bought the tiny table, the girl who walked away from a dinette set because I refused to mark it down to a dollar and the woman who was Soooolllddd on everything.

I told her the yard sale felt like it had been a waste. I was angry with myself for thinking I’d feel better the further I got from everything I’d once known. I’d take the money I’d made on that day and probably spend it over the course of a month on cheap beer. Cheap beer for memories.

My girlfriend went inside to use the bathroom and I continued to regret how eager I was to run away from everything I’d known. As I was pouting, my girlfriend’s mother came up to me. “This is so charming,” she said. “I’ll take it.” She was holding my parent’s spaghetti statue.

I quickly took her money to confirm the sale. “Your daughter always loved this statue,” I said as I wrapped the piece in newspaper and put it into a plastic bag. “Maybe you should give it to her for her birthday.”

The somber feeling of having turned my back on everything that had once been important, interesting or useful quickly washed away as I imagined my girlfriend’s face upon receiving the statue as a gift. She’d roll her eyes, want to make a comment on how trashy the statue was before realizing that she couldn’t without insulting her own family. Somewhere in the distance, I’d be laughing.

It was then that I realized no matter where the objects I had defended, embraced and desired ended up, they would always carry a part of me wherever they went – No matter how much I pushed them away or pulled other things towards me. I grabbed a box, wrote free on the side and began putting whatever could fit inside it. Perhaps my old shoes couldn’t be appreciated for $.15, but I knew someone would find them and be glad they did.

10 Stupid Things I’ve ACTUALLY Done

Posted on by patrickhmorris
1

I put a shirt in the microwave because I wanted it to dry. Little did I know that this doesn’t work at all.

I went to a friend’s work function and after one of his co-workers told a story about how she ruined a client’s ad and felt so guilty about it, I said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ve all made mistakes. One time I drowned this cat by accident.” When she said, “Are you comparing a silly botched ad with murdering a cat?” I said, “It wasn’t really a big deal. It wasn’t MY cat!”

At a company event I was handing out slices of cake. When I got to this woman who weighs close to 300 lbs I said, “Would you like a bigger piece?” When she said no I followed it up with, “Oh, you’re probably on a diet”.

Tried washing my hair with toothpaste to “See What Happened.”

When on the phone with the electric company, I forgot the word “deposit” and kept asking if I was required to pay the “severance charge.”

Kept talking to this girl about how much I liked the movie Wild at Heart the David Lynch movie with Nicolas Cage, but kept calling it Wild Things, the movie with Denise Richards, Neve Campbell and a sex scene.

When my phone rang, and I saw who was calling, I said, “I’m not talking to that guy until he admits to himself that he is gay,” and realized I had pressed “answer” instead of “silence”.

Tried to wake up my vegan friend by putting a cold piece of fried chicken on his face only to have him jolt awake and cut himself on the bone.

Told someone how I had hurt my back stretching and when they accused me of stretching incorrectly I showed them exactly how I had been stretching and hurt myself again.

After a late night, I got onto the subway. I immediately fall asleep. Then, all of a sudden, I woke up and saw the doors are closing. “How long have I been asleep? I must have missed my stop!” I jumped off and realized that I was still at the stop where I had gotten onto the train.

You’re Damn Right I Want Fries With That

Posted on by patrickhmorris
5

For four years I walked by a White Castle two times a day. That’s almost 3,000 times. Some of those times I was too poor to buy a healthy meal. Some of those times I was drunk and craved something greasy. However, I only went in 3 times. The first time was because I had to try the food. Something about the advertised “chicken rings” just drew me in like a tractor beam. 10 Hamburgers, an order of chicken rings and $4 later, and I heard sounds come from my stomach that sounded like a pig getting run over by a steamroller and decided White Castle might not be so great.

I found myself going through the hallowed doors a second time when I couldn’t believe they were actually selling a suitcase of hamburgers for $8. They do and the rest of my weekend was spent praising god for placing so many Starbucks and their relatively clean bathrooms so closely together.

The final time I went into White Castle was after a night of heroic drinking. I was walking home and decided the night had room for one more bad decision. For some reason I only bought an order of onion rings and for some reason I walked a good thirty feet and then threw them at a passing car. That was the end of my White Castle days.

I didn’t resist going to White Castle because I’m health nut by any means. I think I respect my body as much as a big company respects a college intern. The real reason I didn’t grab a fist-full of burgers everyday on my way home was because I wanted Fast Food to be special.

When I was growing up, Fast Food felt like the only thing in my world that made sense. Everything in small town Vermont looked like crappy shows like Little House on the Prairie while Fast Food places looked like cool shows like Miami Vice. Everything in a Fast Food place came in individual packets, was built to be climbed on and tasted like salt. My house was all about lentils in bulk, “careful, that’s an antique” furniture and food that I described as tasting like a wet pair of underwear.

Even though I loved Fast Food, I almost never got to eat it. Due to the ruralness of my town, the nearest fast food place was almost an hour away and my “You can eat bark and not die”-parents never liked feeding me something as kitschy as a Big Mac. Instead it was reserved as incentive to coax us onto the road at 5:00 a.m. or into a “surprise” that almost always turned out to be a trip to the dentist.

That’s why my head almost blew up when, in 8th grade, my family moved to a town that had every form of Fast Food known to man. Carl’s Jr., Jack in The Box, and Del Taco? We’d never heard of these places before!

The first day after we arrived in our new town, I grabbed my bike off the moving truck and headed towards downtown. The wonderful, world-is-at-your-fingertips freedom! It was almost too much to handle. You know what else was too much to handle? A frosty, a jr. cheeseburger deluxe and a large fries while I rode on my bike. As I was crossing the street of a hectic intersection, my bag ripped open and all my fries fell onto the pavement. I should have just accepted my losses and walked away, but my country boy attitude told me there were a few fries that were still good. I frantically picked up as many loose fries off the pavement as I could while cars honked and people yelled at me.

From then on, I forced my dad to drive me for Fast Food. And drive he did. He felt so guilty about uprooting my brother and me that he caved every time we started chanting “K-F-C!! K-F-C!!”

After a few months my brother and I created “The Perfect Meal,” and on Sunday nights we would make my dad drive from place to place picking up essential elements before The Simpsons came on. Here’s how the meal generally went:
- Whopper from Burger King
- Potato Wedges from KFC
- French Fries from Carl’s Jr.
- Chicken Nuggets from McDonalds
- Soda from Taco Bell (we were convinced they had the best dr. pepper)

My father finally put his foot down when we requested he stop at Wendy’s because they had the best plastic forks.

Through our Fast Food gluttony, we amassed a stockpile of condiments. My brother and I insisted we keep them until we could figure out what to do with 20 lbs of small ketchup packets. My parents, however, figured out a plan first. They handed each condiment packet out at Halloween instead of candy. What better way to say “Hi, we’re new here. Fuck you!” than shoving a handful of mustard packets into someone’s candy sack. I became “The kid who lives at that house that gave away mayo packets for Halloween” and then later “The kid who lives at that house that keeps getting egged.”

Hundreds of Whoppers later, I burned myself out on Fast Food. Now, I only reserve it for when I’m on the road. It gives me something to distract me from wondering “Will I get a speeding ticket” or “How much further!?” I can wonder if the Whopper has as many pickles on it as I remember or if they ever got rid of that stupid bun in the middle of a Big Mac. The beauty of Fast Food has always been the anticipation, the thought of something a little salty, a little greasy. It’s never been the “that feeling you might soil yourself means you’re full” taste.

Till Your Hair Hurts

Posted on by patrickhmorris
1

It was time to take a shower when my hair hurt, not a second sooner. I didn’t care if I had mud on my lips or had been sprayed by a skunk, I wasn’t combining soap, water and my skin until my hair felt like a brillo pad that would crunch and crack if I touched it.

The good news is that this moment wasn’t as infrequent as you might suspect. I wore hats for every second of my pre-pubescent life and my hair hurt frequently.

At first I wore hats because I wanted to look like my baseball heroes. I wanted to be Wade Boggs, Marty Barrett, Jody Reed and Roger Clemens. Since I couldn’t grow facial hair and my parents wouldn’t let me wear a baseball uniform to school, baseball hats were the closest I could get.

My parents warned me of the perils of wearing a hat 24 hours a day. They used to say, “You’re going to go bald by the time you’re 18!!” To me this was a misguided threat. The only people cooler than baseball players were basketball players and they made being bald seem cool. Charles Barkley and Michael Jordon were both bald and cool. Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, while my favorite basketball players, looked like normal people who hung out in my town. Why would I want to grow up to look like the guy who shovels my driveway when looking like MJ was an option?

My obsession with hats hit a new high when I realized one day that I was in control of how I looked (which somehow was important to me all of a sudden). Before I had relied on my parents to provide me with hats, but now I was the boss and I could wear a turquoise hat if I wanted. I could wear a white hat that had an off centered logo if I was trying to appear “casual” and I could wear a bright red hat that said “Pogo” if I wanted everyone around me to know that I was a good time.

For most kids, 13 is a difficult year because their body is changing, they’re discovering girls for the first time and they’re stuck in a world where they’re not quite ready to embrace the act of growing up. For me, 13 was an incredibly difficult year. I couldn’t find a fitted hat.

Growing up to me meant wearing hats that could fit your head and no one else’s. It meant showing people you had elevated yourself from a world of adjustable hats and was ready to wear a hat backwards without your hair sticking out. The problem was, it was difficult to find a fitted hat in the size “pinhead.”

While my friends noticed their voices were changing, I noticed my head went from a round pumpkin-like shape to something that resembled a lava lamp. Nothing fit my small, pointy head correctly. Still, I spent the entire year looking for a hat meant for a head like a parking cone.

A year or two later, I was once again ready to expand my hat horizon. Baseball hats were well and good, but they were too casual for a sophisticated socialite like myself. I tried to simulate my brother, who wore a barrette, but for some reason it was difficult to see “sophistication” in the mirror when the barrette was overshadowed by the replica basketball jerseys I wore daily.

When my brother informed me that a hat should accent and not completely contrast your style I went to the thrift store and bought a woman’s blouse, thinking it would match the barrette better. I still can’t decide if I was way off or right on the money.

Somewhere along the lines, my obsession for hats abruptly ended. I’d like to think it was because my social activities changed and I started going to fancy dinners and fooling around with girls. But I think the real reason is that I just grew up and didn’t want to look like I did when I was 12 anymore.

Every once in a while, when I’m way beyond bored or seeking for a slice of unique identity, I consider wearing a hat to create an identity. I think of people who made their hat an icon and wonder if I could do the same. It worked for Indiana Jones. It worked for Abraham Lincoln (which, by the way, that tall, lanky, freak of a genetic disorder guy wearing a tall stove pipe hat is as overkill as a fat guy wearing a meatball on his head).

I think to myself, ‘What about a dunce cap or a civil war hat? Wouldn’t those instantly create an identity?’

The answer is yes. They would, but they’d be forced. I will never be able to wear a hat so sincerely and with such pleasure as I did when I was nine so what’s the point. Maybe I’ll find a hat that works for me, but right now, they all just like things that will make my hair hurt. Besides, I don’t need to wear a fedora for people to know that I’m a dick.