What Goes Around

Bit of a strange day, yesterday.  Attend an Earth Day fest and get critiqued by some guy who’s a Board Member of some do good planning non-profit that sued the City.  For something initiated prior to my arrival.  For reasons that aren’t currently applicable.  Because I’m obviously evil, working for the City, and all.  Ask where and when their Board meetings are so I can attend, maybe patch things up, be The Lorax.  Trees.  Trees are good.  Seaside is now a Tree City USA.  I’m now Seaside’s City Manager.  Correlation or causation? 

Their Board Meetings are private because they do stuff that is controversial and confrontational.  Can’t tell me, won’t tell me where or when they are.  Being The Lorax is controversial and confrontational?  No offense pal, but you might be doing this wrong.  In conversation, learn he is Exec Director of a men’s group thingamabob that promises happiness and enlightenment.  I’m thinking pie and a year’s subscription to Car and Driver, but it careens into a ditch when intimacy is mentioned.  Look pal, we just met.

No, wait.  He corrects himself.  It’s not “intimacy”.  Whew, that was a close one.  It’s “vulnerability”.  I start to squint a little bit.  He calls me on it, and then outlines the thirty-five week program that he runs.  I made that up.  It’s thirty-four weeks.  Still listening, he tells me an introductory meeting is coming up. 

I ask - and I want this noted in the record - if the program merges indestructibility with vulnerability.  Because that would be the sweet spot; being fearlessly open to experience until the Reaper of Grimness calls your number at the delicatessen.  Or bakery.  Or ski slope.  Anywhere but in one of those damn hospitable beds.  Hospital beds and death.  Correlation, or causation?    I don’t go over the whole theory.  I just ask the question.  He critiques my very existence.  I smile, politely.    

First he participates in secret meetings where he sues my City.  Then he offers happiness and enlightenment, under what may or may not be conditions replicable on the planet I presently live on.  Then he critiques an honest question.  By the way, he was wearing a scarf and it wasn’t cold.  Or neckerchief, if that’s more masculine. 

Google up the men’s group thingamabob back at the office and learn I can regain my humanity (unaware I had misplaced it) if I give up, or evolve past, or some such thing that takes an entire baseball season … masculine roles.  So I can carry off neckware on warm days in public with supreme confidence and critique people who walk past my do good table at Earth Day?  I’m gonna have to think about that.             

The other strangeness I didn’t have to think about at all.  I have a bit of fondness for music, and analog, and the design elegance of Yamaha, across their product lines.  Having sourced some vintage Yamaha turntables, I had two prior turntables to sell.  One from the office and one from the FOS.  The FOS is not a big space, storage is at a premium and the turntables would be better with someone else than taking up a third of the closet, in their boxes.  Craigslist to the rescue and some guy named Nate wants them both.

Great.  Fine.  Stop by City Hall before Earth Day fest and pick them up.  $125 for both.  Nate shows up with vinyl hopes and one of those earpiece phone things, blinking as they do.  I say exactly the same thing about the ear thing as I did about the scarf thing.  Which is, nothing.  But I do wonder if my isolation has me falling behind.  I interacted with two new people, both wearing new stuff, like it was normal.  Are they the new normal?  Am I not?  Thank goodness for the Seaside firefighters at the Earth Day fest.  Men.  Normal, role model men.    

I don’t get the stick a digital thing in your ear, but buy two analog turntables.  Whatever.

The strangeness continued into the blackness.  Which is a sentence so cheesy, it makes this whole thing worthwhile.  Nate chimes in via email around 10:00 PM, saying neither turntable works.  Oh crud.  My brief venture into Craigslist capitalism has gone askew.  We do some email troubleshooting and one starts working fine, but the other is a bit skittish.  Tell you what, Nate, you get a refund for the one that is skittish.  Keep it, and dial it in at your convenience, for free.  The last thing I need on my permanent record is audiophile bad karma. 

Or, now that I’m in tune with my vulnerability, any bad karma. 

It all comes around.