On a you’ll-see-why-it’s-related topic, I had a pair of jeans from American Eagle Outfitters which split up the front between the fly and the pocket. If you’re thinking “That’s a strange place for a split”, you’d be right. Up the backside or at the knees, sure… but for some reason these jeans split in this very low-stress area. It’s not the first time this has happened and I’ve had them replaced before.

Last week I went to the Apple store at the Rideau Center in Ottawa and took my battery with me. I was met at the door by a perky college-age girl who asked me what I was after, and I explained that I wanted my battery replaced. She explained that she was sorry, but I would need to make an appointment with a genius bar guy and she’d look into when the next appointment was available. I explained to her - politely - that I did not want to wait for an appointment, as I had nothing to discuss. I simply wanted the battery replaced because clearly it was messed up and I wanted a new one. She asked if I had a receipt and I said I didn’t, praying that she wasn’t going to make this into her excuse for not helping me with an issue that was clearly not my fault. She nodded and summoned over another employee, then asked him to take care of it for me. Three minutes later - literally - I was walking out the door with a new battery. They didn’t check my name in a system to see if I had bought it there, they didn’t try to convince me that it could have been me who messed the battery up. They just replaced it. And I was done.

About twenty minutes later I was in American Eagle Outfitters (this time at the Bayshore mall) and looking to replace my jeans. I explained to the lady behind the counter that the rip was completely unnatural and in a very strange place and that it couldn’t have been me. She agreed immediately that, yes, that’s obviously not something normal wear could have done and then explained that she couldn’t replace them for me. I explained in response that if the tear wasn’t my fault then yes, she should replace them… especially considering that I wasn’t looking for a refund. She offered me a certificate of $20 towards a new pair of jeans and I told her no, I wanted a new pair to replace mine. She told me that was impossible as they don’t make this type anymore and I could buy something that was “on sale” if I liked, though most of the jeans on the shelves were between $40 and $60. As I stressed that I had actually paid $60 for these jeans (or maybe more), she was very adamant that she had no way of knowing how much I paid and would only offer me the minimum. One of her fellow workers behind the counter joined her and parroted the same thing to me, both of them outlining repeatedly why they couldn’t help me and why they couldn’t be sure that I was telling the truth. As they did, voices were starting to get raised from behind the counter (I did not raise mine because mom taught me that it’s the quickest way to make yourself look crazy). Apparently there was cause to suspect I may have been scheming to buy the jeans for a low price, wear them for several months, return when they ripped in a way that I couldn’t control, and receive $20-$40 of product that I hadn’t earned.

Normally I am the kind of guy who asks for a manager to get involved at this point and I’m also the kind of guy who stays in a store and holds my breath till I get what I want, but my schedule on this day didn’t allow for it. The rest of the afternoon I was kicking myself, wishing I had stayed behind and fought… but, alas, I don’t always have time to fight, even when I’m ready to. I ended up with a choice at American Eagle Outfitters: Return the faulty jeans and spend another $20-$40 for new jeans (before tax) or simply accept that I’d permanently lost my investment on the first pair. I was slightly humiliated by having to leave with the $20 coupon instead of a replacement pair of jeans but, in my rushed schedule, I figured that something is better than nothing. I still don’t know if I’ll go back or not.

Obviously, I’m not a high roller. My business will neither make nor break Apple or American Eagle Outfitters. I certainly can’t threaten them with taking my business away because neither of them see a lot of my business in the first place. The truth is, neither of those companies are under any obligation to treat me with respect, courtesy or offer benefit of the doubt. To do so would merely illustrate a good will and customer-centered philosophy.

I don’t really know if there’s a moral to this story except, perhaps, to tell you that I have been telling people how great Apple was about my battery replacement and, additionally, asking people if they know where I can buy some affordable, quality jeans.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
George Eliot

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert Heinlein

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
François de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
Havelock Ellis

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one’s self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
Emma Goldman

I went to the men’s room and I was the first one in (as I said, I’d slipped out early). I went up to the urinal and, naturally, a firehose-like stream began and my entire body said “Ahhhhhh” in concert. Soon after, another bloke came and stood next to me (as there were only two urinals) and he peed as well. Pretty normal, really. The bloke stopped peeing and zipped up and left and another bloke came and took his place… and I was still peeing. THAT guy left and ANOTHER guy came and I was still going. A pee this long had never happened in my life before, and has never happened since.

Now I was starting to feel a little awkward, and I slowly glanced over my shoulder. Behind me there was a line-up of (no joke) about 15 guys… all of them looking very impatient and angry at me because I’d been hogging 50% of the urinals for well past my limit. And let me tell you… their faces were not pleased. They were there, behind me, in silence… scowling.

And like that’s not bad enough… I started to laugh uncontrollably. And so there I am, still peeing after the 4th guy has already taken a place next to me, and I’m laughing. By myself. In the otherwise silent restroom. So the angry mob behind me - themselves full of too much Coke - had to not only endure the wait, but also had to listen to me laugh about it.

There’s no real “punchline” to the story. I eventually finished my camel-like fluid release and washed my hands. Still laughing. Nobody spoke after I was done and, as I left the men’s room, you could hear a pin drop behind me.

Bonus entry:
26. Hope

The comedy begins before I’m even slapping my bare butt on the tanning bed glass like a slab of raw chicken on a barbecue: The girl at the counter advises me that I am going to need some eye protection. This wasn’t unexpected, as I am already aware of the dangers of tanning for your eyes. What was unexpected is that, instead of giving me a small pair of goggles to cover and protect me, she gives me two small, round stickers roughly the size of quarters. These are meant to be folded in a delicate way to make them slightly conical, and then they go over your eyes. I think the part I liked best is how she described it to me like there was nothing weird about taking stickers and plastering them onto your eyelids. Like we just do that casually around the house or when we have a coffee break at work. Like people just hang around with stickers on their eyelids, chatting to each other. Anyhow, the idea is that these little stickers would deal with the ultraviolet rays and keep my eyes safe. Ok. I let that one go.

I filled out a form which asked me questions like “How would you describe your skin tone?” and “What color are your eyes?” and “What color hair do you have?”. Without a word of exaggeration I began to move my hand to circle the questions and then draw a line from the circle to a little note that said “I’m standing right here in front of you. Stop playing Minesweeper for 10 seconds and take a look.”, but I caught myself just before I did it. Apparently these factors are all added up to give you a score of some sort that determines how long your tanning session should be, and the score said that I should have ten minutes in the bed. As you will find out by the end of this blog post, the scoring system has some accuracy problems.

There was a steady stream of questions about my tanning history which, to be honest, I didn’t mind. When someone overdoes it with questions in order to keep you safe, you shouldn’t really begrudge them and should make an effort to cooperate (which is part of the reason I didn’t make the note I mentioned). I have to say that the questions seemed a little random and I think the author of the questionnaire could have saved some time and energy by letting the results of one question inform the results of the next. For instance:

Tanning salon girl: Have you been in a tanning bed in the last year?

Me: No, I have not.

Tanning salon girl: Have you experienced a sunburn from a tanning bed in the last six weeks.

Me: Yes. I have. From the bed I haven’t been in. Somehow it got me while I was sleeping. Through the walls of my house and from hundreds of miles away.

Okay, obviously I didn’t say that. But you get the idea.

There was a lot more discussion and I started to think that maybe she was overdoing it a little. Again, I was trying to make an effort to be cooperative, as she was trying to look out for my safety, but I can honestly say I’ve had shorter job interviews. One thing I remember her telling me was “If you feel yourself burning, you should stop tanning.” Again, I wanted to follow up with something like “Really? Because I was thinking that if I felt myself burning I would just turn up the heat and add 90 minutes to the tanning session.” The main reason I was holding back on some of these snarky answers is because I know full well that a lot of clients probably need to be told stuff like this. I remember reading once about a woman who sued a company that makes contraceptive jelly because they didn’t write on the label that it wasn’t meant to be consumed on toast (which she, predictably, found out the hard way)… so saying things like “If you’re burning your flesh, don’t keep burning it” isn’t necessarily so uncalled for.

Oh, and as a quick aside: I hear that contraceptive jelly tastes horrible.

Obviously you’re waiting for the good part, and here it is: Just before I went into the bed, she asked if I would mind wearing a sticker. I did actually say “Apparently not, because I’m about to stick two of them to my eyelids just because you told me to.” She clarified that no, this would be another sticker in the shape of a heart that’s about the size of a dime and meant to be stuck on my body wherever I wanted it. Now, I’m pretty comfortable in my sexuality but I’m no idiot: Putting a heart sticker on me while I’m tanning will make me look like a 18 year old girl getting ready for Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. Apparently I gave her the expression which let her know she was going to have to do better than that to sell me on the heart. She said that it would help to measure how much tanning was happening by comparing the covered skin with the uncovered skin. She also said that if I wasn’t tanning enough to show a difference, I would get a free session. For some reason, this actually made sense to me and seeing as I’m not exposing my naked flesh to anyone in particular these days, I thought “Okay. Who’s gonna see, right?” I did ask if there was anything available other than hearts. Like an axe or a skull or fighter jet or something. No. There was just the heart. So I took it.

She showed me to the small room where the bed was and told me that there was a radio built in that I could use and I explained to her that I had my own MP3 player and would use that. She had no objections and gave me a quick demonstration on how to start the timer and so-on. She left me on my own, I got undressed, and prepared to lie down in the bed like a grilled cheese sandwich on a George Foreman Grill. First, however, I had to negotiate the earbuds and eye-stickers. So there I am with music in my ears and stickers on my eyelids wandering around like a fat, naked, white, male Helen Keller trying to find the right switches to turn on the tanning lamps and crawl into the bed and tan with a little heart sticker on my stomach. Just so that the story is fully told, allow me to inform you that the glass on the tanning bed is freezing cold.

It’s not so much that I burned. I’m sure you already know this part before I even had to say it. It’s how I burned that makes this so interesting: As I was laying there I was trying to remember an incident I had once before, maybe as many as eight years ago. I was going into a tanning bed after not being in one for a long, long time and I stayed in for five minutes. And I did burn very badly. When I told the salon proprietor (who was a friend of mine but wasn’t there when I did that session) he was laughing at me and told me I should know better than to sit in a tanning bed for five minutes on my first visit.

This was going through my head at what felt like five minutes into the session I’m talking about. A slow, deductive voice in my head was saying it slowly: “If I was in a tanning bed back then… and I burned pretty badly after five minutes… and this timer is set for ten… wouldn’t that mean… ?” Yet, like a contraceptive-jelly-eating idiot, I just laid there. In my defense, I didn’t “feel” like I was burning (which was something she warned me about) so I figured I would be okay. I did feel a slight vague prickling on my skin, yes, but I didn’t know if that was what was supposed to happen or not.

When I got out of the bed, it was awkward and utterly graceless… but I had stickers on my eyelids, so cut me some slack. Speaking of which, I peeled them away a little squeamishly and tossed them into a nearby garbage bin. Then, I reached down to find the little heart and peel that away as well. I felt like I was ready to go when I noticed something wasn’t quite right and reached behind myself to investigate. To my shock and horror, there was a small card (roughly 4″x4″) stuck to my butt. I peeled it off myself and lifted it to take a look. It said “This tanning bed has been sanitized for your convenience” and had a little happy face on it. Even a contraceptive-jelly-eating idiot could figure out the implications of what that would be.

So that night I stood in front of my bathroom mirror looking at myself. There was red flesh all over me, save the underside of my arms which were at my sides, and the burn was drawn along my arm with a red crayon and a ruler. My butt, predictably, was beet red save for a white square where the card had been stuck. What I didn’t predict, however, was the long, pencil-thin line over my back where my cord for my ear buds was trapped as I baked.

Turning back to the mirror, I looked at myself replete in my nudity with red ink painted carefully on me from my shining crimson forehead down to my toes… save for a small white heart off to the side of my bellybutton.

David Gilmour: Time (3:30)
Guitarists talk to each other about the power of slow phrasing, tenor melodies and patience, but few of them understand what that really means. Gilmour is a textbook of how to play an unhurried and patient solo that builds into a crescendo. Add to that his mastery of feedback and delay and it’s pretty much my idea of perfect soloing style. And yes, I do mean above all others on this list (with the possible exception of Knopfler).

Eddie Van Halen: Beat it (2:49)
I love Eddie and I hate him. I love him for the way that he kicked rock soloing up several notches in terms of speed and articulation (thus ushering in the entire 80’s guitar style, I feel) but if it wasn’t for him the parade of guys who just don’t get it wouldn’t have come marching into public view. Never the less, the way he could play so blisteringly fast without losing the song has always been attractive to me, and this seems like the solo that best displays his skill there. I’m particularly in love with the lazy, slurred pinch harmonics that he throws out like it’s nothing.

Mark Knopfler: Calling Elvis (2:17)
Even with all the accolades, Knopfler is a very, very underrated guitarist… probably because it’s hard to measure taste and subtlety (whereas flat-out speed is easy). Even when he’s playing a brief 16th note passage like this one, his phrasing is so dead-on it feels like running water. And, as always, his tone is so perfect it should be in a textbook somewhere.

Kirk Hammet: I Disappear (3:19)
Metallica is like the Beatles of heavy metal, but I’m particularly drawn to how Hammet lets a tiny taste of blues/soul into his guitar solo for once. The single-coil neck pickup really gives him a much more organic sound, too

John Frusciante: Show Me Your Soul (3:08)
It’s interesting to list a guitar solo from a guy who spent a lot of time trash-talking guitar heroes who play guitar solos. In fact, he said his solo for Funky Monks was a mockery of the late-80’s guitar wheedling that had become something of a parody of itself. Though this isn’t the Peppers’ most popular song, the guitar solo feels like rolling thunder and with only a few notes he really makes it explode.

Adrian Belew: Elephant Talk (3:28)
I would say that Belew was my first “adult” guitar influence (after years of Alex Lifeson in my teens). His courage in creating bold, dramatic and dial-up-to-eleven guitar ideas really came across as a way to shrug off traditional rock guitar concepts. This is a really good example of how he can do something so unusual and still have it hit the “OMG ROCK OUT” pleasure center in my brain.

Steve Vai: Sisters (2:12)
Vai made a name for himself as the spiritual successor to Van Halen in the late 90’s, but I always felt that his musical sensitivity went a lot deeper than the sort of frat boy party tunes that were VH’s trademark. This solo is interesting because he borrows so heavily from Wes Montgomery (and, to a lesser extent, Jimi Hendrix) in the parallel octave movement of the melody, and the whole thing feels like it’s a relaxed improv.

Marc Ford: Sometimes Salvation (3:01)
No matter what kind of rock you’re playing, blues is always the textbook for powerful and emotive phrasing. Again, my love affair with the neck pickup is pretty obvious in the sound of this solo, but I’m a bigger fan of his guts in going for the slippery, smooth phrasing and bendy notes. It sounds effortless, but that kind of intuitive playing comes from years and years of hard practice.

Brian May: We Will Rock You (1:19)
There are some guitarists which are like “everyman” guitarist, in that the average guy on the street will recognize the name. Brain May is like that and the seminal Queen hit “We Will Rock You” is pretty deeply engrained in our culture. Even so, the guitar solo is like a feast of perfect guitar tone and note selection. It’s like a joke to consider that the whole world purses its lips and makes goofy air-guitar pantomime when they hear this, but it’s for a reason; it really hits the “rock out” nerve center. I also really like how timeless the sound is.

Randy Rhodes: I Don’t Know (3:28)
I’m a bit reluctant to post another “shredder” on the list, but I think Rhodes’ courage in his phrasing and rhythm is just amazing. Even at breakneck speed, he’s not just feeding us triplets all the time, and I’m even more crazy about how he has no fear at all of slipping into a chromatic passage for effect. Someone once said that if Rhodes hadn’t died at such a young age, people would be saying “Eddie Van Who?”

Joe Walsh & Glen Frey: Hotel California (4:20)
There’s a lot to say about this solo (particularly Joe Walsh’s amazing tone), but I’m particularly in love with the way that they build up to the triplet harmony passage at the end. It’s this slow, powerful, intense buildup and release. I’m also very fond of the mid-70’s phaser tone and how it makes each note sound like it’s talking to you. It’s subtle, but little touches like that are what guitar processors are meant for.

When I was a boy, like ten or eleven, forty was as hard to imagine as sixty or eighty. It was a lot like how one stands at the bottom of a skyscraper and looks up, unable to tell if it’s 30 stories high or 50. It’s so far away from where you are that, past a certain point, all ages are equally abstract.

Then as I got older, arriving in my twenties and beginning the journey of marriage, etc. forty was still abstract but less so; it was a place I knew I would arrive one day. Rather like going on a long car trip which is measured not by its destination but by the many stops on the way.

Then, I arrived in my thirties and the advent of forty became more of a reality, feeling like I was as good as there for ten whole years. This is the decade I spent trying to squeeze the last savory drops out of my youth and taste them before it dried up, as I was scared it would.

Now I arrive at forty and yes, I was right about some things. Banal as it may seem for those who are both a lot younger and a lot older, it’s true that my looks and sex appeal have passed their zenith and I am now very readily showing the signs of age, rather than just traces of it. Grey hair, balding, the softening of my frame and the lines in my face. I’m not merely struck by what offends my vanity, either: I am also noticing that I am becoming unhooked from youth. Popular music and movies no longer interest me. My interest in fashion has largely passed from what’s current to what’s classic. I am more receptive and open to trends and lifestyle changes which slow and simplify my pace rather than accelerate it. My young daughters now roll their eyes at me when I let slip the slightest hint that I don’t understand their icons and touchstones.

I knew all that was coming. Though some people have the personal courage (or personal idiocy) to say “I can’t WAIT to be forty!”, I was never like that. My ego connects strongly to my ability to be cool and so detaching from cool makes me feel like I’m going to the gallows.

Though the picture leading up to forty seemed rather dim, as I am painting it for you, when I arrived I was met with something that I did not expect: Strength, brilliance and clarity have come to me in a way that the never have before. No longer am I the shivering, halting boy full of self-doubt that I was in my twenties or the beleaguered, easily-bullied bumbler of my thirties. Though we reminisce about the adventure of unraveling mysteries for the first time while young, we forget that living in a world that’s mysterious is unsettling and disperses energy needlessly. The excitement and fear that is wicked away by those things which will never scare us again was a thrilling part of passing into adulthood, but while people are quick to point out that something is loss in the surrender of innocence they often forget that ten times more is gained.

One of my favorite people recently told me that “the forties are the decade of perfection” and, interestingly, today I really processed that.

I’m forty now. I don’t want anything back that time has taken away. This is where I prefer to be and this will be my best decade.