Nectar's

Nectar's really was like the touchstone of our young lives. It was home base. If you were going to get together with friends and go out for the evening, you at least met there to decide where you were going. You might go to another place for a bit, but usually you'd step back in to Nectar's just to reconnoiter. It was as much a lounge as anything else. It always had live music, so I dare say the place held extra meaning for those of us touched in that particular way. Also, it never charged a cover.

The food was fantastic and fantastically bad for you. The staff were all long-serving employees and each one was a character that helped color the whole experience. In a lot of ways it was like high school. There were cliques and circles of friends - some you could hang with, some you would just smile and nod at. Different nights of the week had slightly different personalities depending on which band was playing, but even if it wasn't your kind of night, the food was always there for you and if you timed it right you could show up during set break and eat in relative peace. So even if you weren't "going out" that night, you still stopped in to this place to connect with your central nervous system. And on the nights when you were there to see the band, you saw and heard some stuff you'd never forget.

You could probably describe Nectar on paper and most people would think "Yeah - I got it" but it couldn't really tell the story of his significance. The most involved owner you'll ever see. He didn't just make all this possible, he fostered it. But it's not like he cultivated or curated it. He just built the perfect platform for the time and let the community express itself through it. It was just meant to be. This word never gets used in a positive light anymore, but Nectar was the enabler. He was also a bit of a guiding light. Your band better start at 9PM sharp though.

Even though the current "Nectar's" is closing for good (and in this case I mean "for the better") the real Nectar's finished long ago when the avuncular Greek we all knew and loved sold it and retired (and took with him the best breakfast ever served.)

It became a very different place after that. Generations after might have valued other things more, but they never had the chance to refute what we all thought was a good time. They created their own version of Nectar's, but that's partly because they had to.

Today they may wax prosaic about what the place meant to them, but just know they were paying a cover charge and watching a "headliner" that has long since disappeared. We were dodging horrible covers of "Brown Eyed Girl" while enjoying a bowl of turkey soup and a slice of blueberry pie before heading across the street to play pinball.

The Nectar's of the 1980's could never be forgotten and is the reason the Nectar's of today lasted as long as it did, and while this really seems like the part where I should say "We'll miss you, Nectar's!" the truth is most of us said that 35 years ago. The thing we loved was never coming back. So goodbye, whatever that thing is today. It was time for you to go. If it's meant to be, something original will take your place.

Erosion

 Well we ruined it.  Way to go, everyone.  We've thrown every barb, jab, and downright personal affront at every one of our presidents over the last 25 years.  The bar of decorum has been lowered almost to the floor.  Who in their right mind would want the job now?

No one.  No one in their right mind.   Which means we've pretty well guaranteed ourselves that we'll only ever have presidents who can't see straight.  The only people who are going to want the job will be the ones so clouded by ego that there's no way they could serve the country's best interest.  

The argument of course is that each of these presidents has done despicable things; reached levels of incompetence and evil so low that the opposition are thoroughly justified in their reaction.  Maybe, but only if you have that much animus to begin with.  I don't think you can blame the President for dragging it out of you.  Don't try to convince me (or yourself) that it's just your passion for your country that made you print up those "I did that!" stickers, or made you chant "Let's go Brandon!" or create a day-calendar of 365 "Bushisms" to remind people of quotes that weren't his most eloquent.

Just like it's not a good look to trash anybody, I think it's never been a good look to trash the President.  I'm not even talking about respect for the office.  I'm just talking about going off on somebody.  It's generally not well received.  When they go after the President, people think they're in the clear.  It probably makes them feel intelligent and informed to be able to challenge a President's policy on... anything. 

But there's an erosion taking place.  When we stop checking each other as the insults start to fly, the bar keeps lowering.

 

"Slick Willie" - Clinton

"Worst President Ever" - Bush 43 

"Socialist in Chief" - Obama

"Orange Man Bad" - Trump 45

"Fuck Joe Biden" - [you... you figured out which one this was, right?] 

"Fascist, Loofa-Faced Shit-Gibbon" Trump 47

 

So what's left?  What do we call the next president we hate?  And you know, no matter who it is, plenty of people are going to hate whoever it is.  "I love the country so much, I called our new president the most foul thing you've ever heard anyone say!"  Well congratulations on your performative outrage.  I hope it sells you a lot of merch.  And God bless America!

Toxic!

Kinda too bad that "toxic" has become a buzzword.  Nuclear waste is toxic.  Sulfuric acid is toxic.  Those are things that, y'know... kill you almost instantly?  Behaviors generally don't.  They might be abhorrent.  They might be emotionally devastating, but they aren't toxic.  

Doesn't matter though because language and communication today are more emotionally driven than ever, and the word "toxic" is highly charged, so that makes it the perfect choice.  It's all part of Rage Culture®, which I will not rehash here.

Masculinity has really been the main target of this adjective.  There's a concern that men are severely damaging themselves emotionally because of intense pressure to conform to some (unpublished) masculine ideal.  I don't know that there's an owner's manual that defines the masculinity that all men are supposed to strive for, but I'm assured it's out there!

Here's where I say something sexist...  

I think a lot of men just gravitate towards behaviors that have been pinned as toxic.  We don't tend to ask each other how we're feeling mentally.  We don't usually talk about our wives or kids or any family members.  We make up stupid jokes.  We talk about repairs.  We really tend to focus on things different from what women focus on, and I'm here to tell you, it isn't because we're forcing ourselves to think of these things.  We're not, secretly inside, hoping one of our buddies will start talking about an emotional issue so that we can all finally let our guard down and cry together.  Some of us don't even have much ability to cry. 

Of course some men aren't quite wired this way, which is totally fine, but the simple fact is those dudes won't really be able to hang out with the guys who are wired that way.  No different than how a group of guys that want to talk about NASCAR all day won't be seen with the ones who want to talk about Dungeons and Dragons, even if all these guys want to cry.

So go easy with your opinion of toxic men.  We're just following a genetic code that makes us the louche knuckle-draggers you so love to hate to love.  Plus, we went through all this shit with Phil Donahue like a thousand years ago.  We became sensitive men.  We bought sweaters.  It didn't stick.  Don't expect this will, either.

The Clean Room

I got the chance to visit a manufacturing clean room recently.  I didn't actually get to go in the clean room but I got to see it up close through windows and was introduced to the gowning area, where I got to try on all the garb.  I do love that phrase "gowning area."  Sounds like maybe a coronation is about to take place.  Except the reality of it is about a million miles from that.  This brief tour really left a mark on me.  

To prepare for entry into the clean room, you must

• Stick each foot in the shoe scrubber
• Wash and dry your hands
• Wear latex gloves
• Don a bouffant (hair net)
• Affix a veil around your head that hangs from just below the eyes down just past the neck
• Wear a hood that covers all the way down over your shoulders, executioner style
• Wear a full-length jumpsuit (following the correct protocol so the sleeves don't touch the ground while you step into it) that snaps at the neck, containing the veil and the base of the hood
• Step into calf-length "boots" that have their own rubber soles that affix by snapping over your shoes, with protective material that extends up over the calf and attaches with another snap around the leg

That's it.  You're now completely covered, from head to toe, with just a small horizontal space for your eyes.  Are your hands sweating from the gloves yet?

Now you work a 12-hour shift.  Hold on - don't panic just yet.  It might sound worse than it is.

But probably not.

The clean room itself is very large, but no one works the whole room.  In fact, you work in just one of many large hallways within the room.  Each hallway contains the large machine needed to complete one step of the process.  A worker is assigned to only one machine/hall, so that's where you spend your day.  The rows are maybe 10' wide and 60' long.  There are various carts full of bins and other racks of things lining the sides of the hallways.  It's all not too unlike a hospital ward.  Some of these hallways are lit with that similar antiseptic white light, but many of them are lit with a strange orange light.  There's certainly no trace of sunlight.  The sound like that of computer cooling fans surrounds you.  Not excessively loud but elevated and relentless.  No one seems to wear hearing protection, maybe because that would just be the last straw?  The temperature and humidity in the room are always exactly the same.  The net effect here is sensory deprivation.  

You yourself aren't really making the semiconductors.  All that work is microscopic.  It's all done by specialized machines.  Your job is to simply load the machine, and then unload it when it says it is done.  Then you hand off that piece of the puzzle to the person in the next row who feeds it into their tool and passes it off to the next person and so on.  It requires training but is essentially unskilled labor.  Some days you're quite busy and on your feet almost the whole time.  Other days you're doing a lot of sitting around in that ridiculous get-up trying to find ways to kill time while your rods and cones get oranged to oblivion.

I don't think humans are made to do this.  That having been said, it's possible it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.  I mean, it's pretty bad, but I can almost see how anyone even does it.  Within that 12-hour shift, you get two, paid, one-hour breaks.  An hour is a pretty long break.  It's sort of human.  You have the flexibility to take these breaks whenever you want (as coordinated with your co-workers.)  Ideally, you could work 4 hours, take a break, work 3 hours, break, and then finish up the final 3.  There's an exercise room on site.  You could also just leave for awhile and go see life.

But could you do that and, after seeing actual living humans out in the wild, still force yourself to go back to the clean room for your next 3 hours, or would you just walk?  It might help if you think you're providing the world with much needed semiconductor chips.  At least it might help for awhile.  

Still, employers know this world of sensory deprivation is out of the ordinary, and I imagine years of turnover have led them to create a schedule that helps these clean room workers keep their sanity.  Sorry for all the math here, but in this schedule there exists a time when you'll have 2 days off, 2 on, and then another 2 off.  The schedule is 2 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off, 2 on... so the worst it ever gets for you is 3 consecutive 12-hour days.  With the two, one-hour breaks thrown in there, the 12-hour day doesn't seem too bad, but when you consider you have to wrap yourself in some kind of polyethylene pita and walk up and down the same hallway for the entire waking day... it starts to seem a little... badder.

Burnout is a problem in these jobs.  I don't think it's just the hours.  It really can't be that healthy to wear that stuff all day every day.  That orange light has to mess with your vision.  The pay is pretty base-level, but it's a job that provides benefits (85% paid anyway) and it's a steady employer.  I think people stick with it for a certain amount of time until it catches up with them that humans really aren't meant to do this - or if at all, certainly not for very long.  It's borderline psychological warfare that eventually loses the borderline.

In this particular case I think it's good news that the employer is currently hard at work trying to replace all these employees with robots.  I'm sure the employer is enticed by the payroll savings and work advantages of not having to have live employees.  Carting items from one place to another, feeding those items into machines, waiting for those machines to finish... all sounds like something robots would excel at.  The company is focusing on a better bottom line, but in some strange twist, this phasing out of human jobs seems merciful.  It might appear to be in the best interest of the company, but what I see is one less cruel circumstance desperate workers have to be subject to.

Dystopia

 Okay!  We've hit that point in the cycle again where weight loss takes center stage!  These are exciting times and I know you, like me, are eager to get started and dive into the soul-crushing world of hunger and deprivation, so let's get to it!

Now that I have that pointless intro off my chest, lemme tell you, from years of experience with the weight loss yo-yo, what the hardest part of the process is.  

(I hope you didn't fall for that "hardest part" misdirection because right off the bat that could be your first mistake. Did you think there was just one hard part?  Nope!  But it isn't all bad.  Really.  Allow me to break it down into the sections as I've seen them.)

1) Starting

Starting is probably the hardest part.  That's the day you decide to break the habits.  It's the day you deprive yourself of the snack that you look forward to every day, which, if I can say it one more time, means you have to deny yourself something you look forward to every day, so there's going to be an immediate void.  Since you're on Day One, you don't yet have any progress or results to look back on.  That means all you have in this moment is disappointment; disappointment in your weight, and disappointment in this stupid, lousy day that doesn't have your favorite snack.  I don't have any advice on making it through this obstacle but I'm here to tell you, once you manage to give that stuff up, you actually get used to living without it pretty quickly.  

Sidebar: Keep in mind I'm a calorie-counter.

The only thing I focus on is my caloric intake,

and I aim for a pretty low number.  Within reason,

I don't worry too much about how I get there.

Although during the diet phase I cut out almost

all sugar, I still sometimes eat french fries and

some other things that aren't good for me.

But, my #1 rule is to make sure I don't exceed

my daily calorie limit.  French fry calories can

add up pretty fast, so if I eat them, I've got a

lot of other offsetting choices I need to make.

Also, I don't do any exercise beyond just staying

active.  I ride a bicycle and walk and do yard 

work, etc., but you won't catch me on a treadmill

or going for a jog.  I've noted before, all exercise

does is make me hungry and I've already got that 

well covered, thanks!

After just one week in, two major things happen.  First, you've established a new normal and, this can't be overstated, you'll start to see your new routine develop a path forward.  You settle into a groove, and the next few weeks won't feel like they require as much effort.  The other thing that happens after just one week is you feel just the slightest difference in the way your clothes fit.  Things are just a liiiiiitle less snug. You really need to key into this feeling and the momentum it carries.  The groove/path forward that you just established only brings more of this over the next few weeks.

  

2) Ten Weeks In

After about ten weeks of this goddamn bullshit you start to lose patience with being hungry.  You really start to tire of feeling famished and you just want to eat something and be happy.  Good luck with this stage. But, after ten weeks of eating sensibly and limiting your calories, you can easily have lost 10 pounds.  Not unreasonable to think you may have lost 15 pounds.  You also need to really key into this feeling and take some pride in your progress and results.  Hopefully that keeps you from throwing all that work away.

3) Those Last Five Pounds

No one has much sympathy for someone who says they really need to lose five pounds.  In fact saying that out loud is likely to get you punched.  In fact, it probably should.  Don't say it.  Those last five coming off won't likely make you look much different but, again, you'll feel it in the way your clothes fit.  Either way, you're so close.  Don't give up now.  You've come this far.  Finish it!

4) Finishing It

Now what?  No, seriously... Now what?  Now you're just thin forever, right?  You put in all the work and I guess you're done and that's it.  The truth to this is there's a glorious moment in achieving your goal weight where, just for a moment, you can eat whatever the hell you want and you're still thin.  There probably isn't a greater feeling in the world.  This moment lasts approximately 12 and one half seconds, then you turn around and march right back into the direction from whence you came.  

Slowly slipping back into the habits that got you in trouble is all too easy and subtle, and that's what makes it so hard to avoid.

I think the key from here on out is to get on a scale once a week and make a move as soon as you see it go up by 3 pounds.  Don't let it get to 5.  Good luck.  

Enjoy your success!  See you back at Step One real soon!

5 Years is Enough

 Here's, by far, the worst thing to come out of the pandemic; ring lights.  Damn those infernal things!  I'm sure you've seen them.  It's like a head-sized black plastic ring on a stand with a holder in the middle for your phone.  It centers your phone in a harsh and cold ring of LED light, and that's not even its worst problem.  The worst of it is that it makes the creepiest little white circle at the center of your eyeballs which produces some weird kind of zombifying effect.  At best.  At worst it looks makes you look like a cyborg.

I am either being recorded or those things are about to shoot bright blue lasers.

So please, people, lay off the ring lights.  The ring light was originally the domain of dentists.  It's a great light source for super closeup (macro) photography because when you get the camera really close to the subject the lens blocks your light, so having a ring of light on the end of the lens was kind of the perfect solution.  These lights used to be called dental rings.  Now I think they are just called "lights".  It would be best if we just called them off.

Right!

Back in the 1900's when I went to a college with training wheels on it, I was taking my final exam in a computer class.  The class was about databases.  It's where I learned the word "concatenate", which is a tremendously fun word.  Let's all say it!  conCATenate   FUN!

I understood that class.  It wasn't that hard but navigating your way around a database requires its own sort of choreography that can trip you up so it was really just about learning some of that.

At this final exam, the instructor asked us to pull a list of names from Group A and Group B that met a similar criteria.  It was one of a series of queries (and I think I am going to trademark "Series of Queries" and somehow use it to profit from the gay community) we had to do for this final exam.  These queries were set up at a variety of workstations around the classroom and we could do them in any order we wanted.  I noticed everyone in the class breezed through this particular question.  When I got to it I hit a brick wall.  With a couple more queries to go, I spent a good chunk of my time trying to figure out how to do this one.

Here's where I make the long story shorter.  Turns out the question was not valid.  Data from Group A and Group B just does not intersect.  After about 15 valuable minutes of self-doubt, wondering if I was sick on the ONE day we discussed how to do this, I boldly (but quietly) went to the instructor and said "This can't be done" fully expecting a disappointed look and perhaps a "I can't help you" but the instructor stared at the question in silence for a good ten count and just said "Leave it blank."

Okay.  So everyone else in the class answered it wrong.  I got it right.  What, do you suppose, are the chances everyone else will have their scores reduced?  Hold on - let me run a quick query on that.  Oh - ZERO.  ZERO CHANCE.

Here's my point, summarized as quickly as possible in the least preachy way I can muster because it's a new year and who wants to start out with a lecture?

Being the only one who is right isn't an automatic free pass.  It puts you against the grain and that makes you a little wrong.  So if you plan to actually do anything with the info, it can take a little courage to be the only one who is right.  Look at the guy who knew the Space Shuttle wasn't ready for launch.  He was the only one and he wasn't insistent enough to stop "the machine" behind the machine so off it went.

Call it groupthink, herd mentality, conformity... whatever buzzword you like. When everyone else has it wrong and you have it right, you're in a position, and I think you often have to weigh the advantages of calling out the error because the first reaction will be that you are difficult.  You're also going to embarrass a bunch of people.  You're going to screw up the social dynamic.  It better be worth it.  Maybe it is, but you might be wrong.