My own daughter! Honestly, I forget why she said this. She's fifteen; I'm sure she had her reasons. But here's the point: she gave me an unexpected solution to my lack of blogging ideas. Why not just post a catchy headline — YOU LOOK LIKE A DRUNK DYING LIZARD—and nothing else? Call it a day? Why bother with content when click bait will do the trick?
Why not, indeed. But as I typed in "my daughter says I look like a drunk dying lizard," I was struck by, well, how easily I'd worked around the problem of having no bloggable ideas.
Could this, in itself, be a subject to blog about? How we, as a species, habitually come up with ways to circumvent a problem—without actually eliminating the problem?
After all, my life is an endless series of workarounds. Perhaps I'm not unique. Could all of humanity live this way?
I'll start by mentioning the Starbucks incident, as embarrassing as it is. This occurred last year, in Saratoga. It was Sunday evening. A tall dark roast, extra room, sat just to the right of my Macbook Pro. Naturally, as I reached to wipe a spot off my screen, I swiped the coffee. My dark roast, extra cream, splashed across the keyboard. The keys went crazy – the T was a Q, the 7 was a exclamation point. Etc. Etc. The display began to quiver and the text shook, as if not used to all that caffeine and I should have ordered a decaf instead.
The computer went dark. And stayed that way. I tried the usual advice, such as aiming a blow drier at the keyboard for several hours, to no avail. Predictably, someone – it could have been our lawnmower guy, or maybe the kitchen tiler — suggested I "swap out" the motherboard. He might as well have suggested I "swap out" my car engine. I laughed in his face. Rather, the corners of my mouth twitched and stopped well shy of a laugh.
So I wrote by hand, which felt unique and refreshing for a few days until my fingers began to ache and my productivity plummeted.
Workarounds, to be sure, aren't perfect. Fortunately, there's comfort in numbers, and I have plenty of company.
Just ask the women who lived during World War II, who in the name of patriotism were urged to look beautiful to boost the morale of soldiers home from the front. With cosmetics in short supply, some resorted to using beetroot juice to stain their lips, talc in place of face powder, and lipstick (presumably beet juice) as blush. Stories abound of how they painted their legs with gravy because they couldn't get a hold of stockings. One woman was said to have drawn lines down the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil so it looked like seamed stockings.
President Obama has his workarounds too. When the Senate refused to even consider his nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, for the Supreme Court, he started a full-court press against vulnerable GOP senators demanding they give him a hearing, or face daunting re-election prospects come November. And the Republican establishment has rigged a solution to keep frontrunner Donald Trump from nabbing the nomination. Unable to stop Americans from voting for this bombastic rebel, they're pushing hard for a brokered GOP convention this summer to force through an alternative nominee.
Faced with the daunting prospect of a mountain chain between him and the Romans, Hannibal worked around the problem. Instead of calling off the attack, as logic suggested, he sneaked forty elephants and 50,000 men across the Alps in three weeks flat to defeat his foe.
She predictably accuses me of one of the seven deadly vices—sloth. I counter that life is a jury-rigged solution. I retell the story of our first date. This was sixteen years ago. After meeting over the Internet and exchanging some emails, we arranged to meet in person at a coffee house in Lower Manhattan, where I was reading from fiction of mine. Living in New Jersey at the time, she drove to Manhattan in a beat-up car that began to flash its radiator lights just before the Lincoln Tunnel. A burnt smell wafted through the vents. She could have turned around at that point. She could have flagged down a cop, or pulled over for roadside help. Instead, she opened the windows wide, threw caution to the wind, and drove on to Manhattan.
She made it just in time for my reading. Fifteen years later, the jury-rigged solution still holds, and we have the daughter to prove it.
I finish retelling our story, hoping the blush of romance will temper my wife's reaction. Ingrid smiles cautiously. She opens her mouth to say something, corralling her lips to form words.
Please don't call me a drunk, dying lizard, I think.
When he's not jury-rigging his life, David Kalish writes novels and plays. He is the author of The Opposite of Everything, a romantic comedy and cancer story rolled into one.
Source: My daughter says I look like a drunk dying lizard
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