Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Employees at a local grocery store wear shirts with “Look for the food you love” on the back.
I got caught up thinking about what food I love. Pie jumped into mind. I didn’t look for pie that day. Nor did I look for fruits and veggies, which I also love, or nuts and seeds. Nor cheese. Sandwiches. Didn’t look for them, either. Or pizza, another food I love.
I just looked for yogurt that day. It was on sale. A good price.
That’d be on my tee’s back: “Look for food you love with a good price.“
I received a haircut today, the first in two months. It was a few weeks overdue. My hair is losing its presence on top and my forehead keeps pushing my hair line back. Hair grows thick and heavy on my sides and back, and still falls in waves of curls. The whole thing can become an unmanageable beast, fighting me about what I want it to do. It won a few times this week. I finally acquiesced to a growing need to deal with it.
Part of my reluctance is the pandemic protocols. We’re in a small town. Not many barber shops, salons, and stylists are among the businesses. Our town is oriented toward college students and tourists, translating business needs into drinking and eating establishments – pizza, restaurants, and beer, wine, coffee, and pastries. Scattered among them are gas stations, grocery stores, clothing boutiques, and bookstores.
Places catering to hair are less frequent. Almost all closed on Sunday and Monday. Most close early on Saturdays. The windows to get a haircut get perilously small. Pandemic closures meant less people working in these places. Appointments are the norm, and they’re precious. I was turned away because nothing was available at three locations in the course of five attempts spent over three days.
An appointment for a haircut. That blows away my youthful memories of walking into quiet establishments, taking a number, and waiting ten to fifteen minutes. In my military days, aka my youth, I had more hair to cut and more frequent needs to cut it to meet regulations. But the prices were better. In the beginning, we’re talking $1.10 for a haircut. Slowly it went to two dollars…five…ten…
Today, I spent $30 with a tip to trim my silvery locks and tame my curls. But I put the $30 haircut into context with coffee. I used to spend fifty cents to a dollar for a cup of coffee. I spent $4 on a cuppa today. Filling my car with gas cost six dollars for a time back then, compared to the fifty I just put out. Yeah, bread was two dollars a loaf, and it now runs $7. It was white bread back then, and now it’s multigrain, and I buy it cheaper at Costco, which wasn’t around back in those days. Cat food was a quarter a tin. Now it hits a dollar each. Hell, I remember spending $7,000 to buy a new Firebird, an expense that took a deep breath to decide after hours of calculations and days of mental wrestling. Good luck finding a new car, loaded, for seven grand these days.
I’ll just put in a mention about real estate. We bought our first place for half a million dollars. Family, still used to lower prices, were stunned. It wasn’t a large place, a sixteen hundred square foot condo, three bedrooms, three baths, two car garage, three stories. My family was more astonished when we sold that place after a few years for three hundred grand more than we paid. I was astonished, too. That was almost twenty years ago.
Context. It all costs more now — houses, cars, air fare, food, clothing, and yeah, haircuts. I look good, though. Young Megan, probably in her twenties, did a good job.
I think.
Get ready for an old man rant. That’s how it sounds in retrospect. Let it fly.
“Let’s go shopping,” my wife said. “Plan a day when we go out so I can get new exercise clothes. I want to go to my exercise class in person on April first, and I’d like to do it in something other than the clothes I was wearing two years ago.”
Yes, I agreed, because I knew what she was talking about. We’ve been strong isolationists, social distancing, zooming, vaccinated, masking, almost living like recluses. Well, recluses who have television and streaming services, computers, telephones, and safe friend pods. Maybe not quite recluses. Maybe, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe.
But we went through this before, where mandates were lifted, places partially opened. We took advantage of that. Our concern is that there will be some sort of new worrying spike and mandates and shutdowns will roll in anew. So we went out shopping and ate in a restaurant. Masks were worn while shopping. We wore masks until we were seated in our isolated, plastic walled table at the restaurant. We went early, to avoid crowds, but risks remain. The masked were the minority by far.
It’s been a while since I went shopping. I think it’s been a year. I saw some blue jeans. Levi’s. I thought, hey, they’re nice. Maybe I’ll buy a pair of denim pantaloons. The price stopped me: $69.50. For jeans? Off the shelf jeans? Levi’s? I remember when they were the jeans of the poor and downtrodden. And that at J.C. Penney’s.
Looking at shoes, I was appalled about how ugly and clunky men’s shoes have become during the pandemic. Lot of red, white, and blue stuff, too. I thought, I’ll have to watch people, see how many are actually wearing these. I suppose I’ll need to focus on the young, those who have not yet counted past forty years.
Wrigley’s gums come in Peppermint ‘Cobalt’ and Spearmint ‘Rain’. WTF? I read their ingredients: they looked like gum with a new name.
My superpower held solid, so I managed to find the worst checkout line possible at Target. It’s good to know that I can depend on that power. I perused magazines at hand. Know how much a magazine costs? $12.99 USD. What? Why, that’s how much a book used to cost. Now, of course, a book is $26.00 for a hardback, $16.00 for a softback. That’s why I buy used books or go to the library. Of course, many used books are now over $10.00
Then there was my beer: $7.25 for 16 ounces of Blue Moon. My entree was $11.99. My drink was over 50% of the price of my meal. That’s frigging stunning. They asked me if I wanted a 22 oz beer, but that would’ve probably topped my credit card’s limit. It only goes into five digits.
I guess it was all a shocker. I’ve seen food prices. We laughed about paying $50 at grocery stores and walking out with two light bags. Filling the gas tank on the Mazda was $45.
Stunning. I feel for the people on the edge. I remember when I had people working for me in the military thirty years ago, and the cost of childcare. It basically almost equaled those young people’s take home pay. I hear it’s become worse. Looking at the small sampling which I experienced, I believe it.
I haven’t flown in about a year. It’s surprising how much has changed at the various airports and airlines. Most critically, I let my TSA Pre-check expire. Now I must wait in lines, strip down to my boxers, flash my privates, and share everything that I have to eat with anyone in a five foot circle before going through security.
One thing that hasn’t changed are my people. I don’t know them. I hope they’re my tribe. You’ve probably seen them, one arm bent at the elbow, a cuppa coffee extended in front of them like a bumper, marching their bags in search of. Soon as localized, I found a Peet’s — YES! PEET’S — and purchased a coffee.
High airport prices haven’t changed. $3.19 for a small coffee. Yikes. If it wasn’t a bonafide medical emergency, I may have passed. But caffeine was calling and the sky was falling…
It was needed, though. Looking forward to another thirteen hours across land and through air before reaching the final place.
Cheers
Perhaps, if you’re old enough, you remember having thirty-three and forty-five RPM records that you played on your phonograph.
Maybe you had eight-track or cassette tapes. Perhaps you had a VCR later, playing VHS tapes. Maybe you went with Beta.
Then you switched to Laser Discs, Blue Ray, CDs and DVDs before you started streaming.
You may have used a Walkman a couple decades ago, before changing to an iPod Shuffle. Maybe you use your phone now, downloading your songs from the Cloud.
It’s fun living through these changes. Now we’re embracing more changes. Ford and GM have both announced moves to curtail selling cars in the United States this year. The profit margins on manufacturing cars is small, and sales are down. People are buying more SUVs and pick-ups, if they’re buying a motor vehicle at all, because motor vehicles overall have declined. Young people aren’t buying cars as often.
Just curious, but do you remember talking about SUVs in your youth? I didn’t; we had utility vehicles then. The sports came later.
Do you remember the mini-van craze, or are you too young to remember that?
Young people are marrying less these days. The median age for a man in America to marry was twenty-nine point five years old, up from twenty-three in the early 1970s.
Young people are also dating less. They struggle with interpersonal relationships of romantic and sexual natures if they’re engaged face to face. It’s easier for them if there’s a cell phone involved.
Did you know what a Tinderella is?
Fun fact. My friend the professor struggles initiating class discussions in her class of twenty-somethings. Then she started posting texts, and the discourse began.
Ah, cell phones. Remember princess phones and wall phones, cordless phones? Remember pagers? Remember car phones?
Do you remember Instamatic cameras?
Meanwhile, NASCAR paid attendance is declining. Less people are watching the races on television, as well. That’s parallel to a trend of declining NFL paid attendance and television ratings.
Remember playing video games? Are you old enough to recall Pong? Did you ever think about playing a game on your phone? Did you ever believe that you would enjoy playing games on phones so much that you needed data plans to enable your habit?
Beer sales in America are declining. More people are drinking wine.
Over in the Olympics, snowboarding was a big draw in 2018 while the slalom was dropped. Word came out last week that the IOC is not planning to have boxing in the 2020 Olympics.
Went to the movies the other day. When I was young, over fifty years ago, we had a cartoon or short film before the feature. That’s been replaced with ads, trailers, and previews.
The movies cost thirteen dollars for two of us the other day, cheaper than many places, but do you remember paying less than a dollar for the movies? Mom remembers paying a nickel, but she’s over twenty years older than me.
A nickel to get into the movies was a long time ago, wasn’t it?
Shall we talk about the price of gasoline? How ’bout a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, or a cup of coffee?
Say, do you remember when you first thought about buying organic?
These times, they are a’changin’.
Never is a big word, easily used. “I’m never going to Texas,” she said. “It’s full of racists and rednecks.”
I have family in Texas. They are somewhere on the spectrum of both of those things. Reliable Republicans, they think whites are getting a raw deal and distrust the M&Ms of Mexicans and Muslims. They’ve never actually experienced deprivation, never went hungry or without a roof, but still, they hear stories.
“I’m never riding on trains. They’re so dangerous.”
This was brought on by a train wreck in Spain that killed four. Wrecks happen. They’re never riding on trains because of an accident. What does that leave? Cars, bikes and planes? Because no one has ever been killed using those. People walking are killed, as are people in bed, suffering from nature’s attacks (quakes, tornadoes, hurricanes) to human events (gas line explosion). What are you going to do, hole up so you don’t die, with a plan to live forever?
I’ve jumped on the Never train many times (oooh, like that as a title for something, “The Never Train”), irked by Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, IBM, Comcast, HP, United, Delta, AT&T, Geico, McDonalds, Hillary, Trump, Republicans, Democrats, the NFL, the Senate, the House, the SCOTUS, Obama, Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Monsanto, police shootings, mass shootings, terrorist bombs, drone attacks…. Never comes easily but it’s rarely forever.
“I’m never going to stop drinking coffee,” I say, but with the rust disease, who knows? Yesterday, I bought a quad shot mocha for over five dollars, a bottle of wine for six dollars, and a pint of beer for six dollars. The QSM was purchased on the road in another town. “Too much,” I said, with a grimace, but held back from loosing the N word. “Six dollars for a bottle of Pinot Noir?” I asked. Seems too good to be true but I refrained from saying, “You can never get a good wine for six dollars.” It was hard to not say. Six dollars for a pint of Ninkasi Sinister Black Ale? That seemed steep, too. What is my Never point, I wondered.
My wife illuminated the never point in later conversations. While the prices of coffee, wine, beer (and gas) were striking, we have money that provide us a large comfort zone. The prices are noted and shrugged off. Sure, the comfort zone experienced a little nibble on the edge, but it’s a broad space, and that makes strides of difference.
We remembered when a car repair would mean a budget analysis to see what we would do without or reduce to save enough money to fix the car. Pennies were hoarded to purchase a treat, like ice cream at DQ. We didn’t drink wine, rarely drank beer, and our coffee was bought for fifty cents a cuppa. We never thought any of that would change.
But life is full of nevers. We never imagined video games being such a massive business, with their primary demographics being adults. We never thought Ashland would have the country’s record high, 108 degrees F. We never thought we’d track and study wildfires and El Nino and La Nina, never thought we’d quit subscribing to cable television, never thought a friend would do the things she had, never thought violence would come to our neighborhood. But it all happened.
So, I think, as I write like crazy and work, saying never rarely holds. I don’t think I’ll never say never again, but I will be more mindful about it.
At least, I’ll try, because always is a lot like never.
Michael Seidel, writer 