Monolith Mystery Mastered!

With only five weeks left in 2020, I think I speak for the entire human race when I say it would be nice if what is left of the year passes without any strange or startling news items. Yet yesterday, a doozy of a news item came to us when it was revealed that Utah officials surveying a remote section of their southeastern desert via helicopter, spotted a hitherto unnoticed 10 to 12-foot metallic monolith standing tall amidst the red rocks. A crew was dispatched to take a closer look and found no clues to reveal why it was there, how it got there, or how long it has been there. They kept this quiet for a week before releasing the information to the public, at which point the internet exploded.

Of course, countless theories have been put forth as to the origin of this structure and countless references have been made to the 1968 sci-fi movie classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which large metallic monoliths of extraterrestrial origin show up in odd locations. Because of the iconic nature of that film, some have suggested (although mostly in jest) that the monolith was, indeed, placed there by space aliens. This has prompted an official with the Utah Highway Patrol to emphatically state to reporters that “this thing is not from another world.” Of course, it’s doubtful that this official has a degree in astrobiology, so really, how would he know?

The prevailing theory about this mystery monolith is that it was erected by an avant-garde sculptor. But the artists considered the most likely candidates for building this sort of thing have said they have no knowledge of it and nobody has come forward to claim ownership of the odd object. Perhaps nobody has come forward because it’s illegal to place unsanctioned sculptures on federal land, but you would think if an artist really did pull a stunt like this, they would want the recognition for it, even if it meant the possibility of getting charged with a felony.

For my money, I think the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the best bet. No, I’m not some whack-job who thinks that 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a true story and director Stanley Kubrick had access to inside information about contact with alien life. Rather, I’m some whack-job who thinks that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is what prompted aliens to place the monolith in the desert in the first place. And once you hear my theory about this you’ll think, “Maybe Andrew isn’t a whack-job at all. Maybe he’s just a regular job."

Consider the following:

1- According to Forbes magazine (where I get all my scientific data) “there are up to 19,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars similar to ours with at least one planet similar to Earth.” For those of you who prefer words to numbers, that is nineteen-sextillion.

2- If only one in a trillion of these Earth-like planets had life on them, that would still be 1,000,000,000 planets with life. (That’s one billion for my word-oriented friends.)

3- One has to assume (given the current state of affairs here on Earth) that a lot of those planets would have more advanced intelligence than us.

4- Since we have been sending television and radio signals out into space for decades, one can also assume that alien civilizations are watching and listening to all the entertainment we have created. (And for free no less! Wait until the cable companies figure out they’re getting pirated by extraterrestrials!)

5- Given all the hard facts I just put out there, it stands to reason that some (if not many) space aliens have watched the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

6- As with any large group of beings, you have to figure that amongst the aliens, some of them are practical jokers. (Just because a civilization has technology light years more advanced than ours doesn’t mean they don’t have some citizens who enjoy the simple pleasures of a whoopee cushion.)

7- Assuming that some of these extremely advanced civilizations have technology capable of watching us in real time, would it really be far-fetched to think this conversation couldn’t have happened:

Groxnorp: It’s wild to see what’s been going on with those Earth dudes over their past solar year.

Flajwok: I know, I know. It’s like, what crazy crap can befall those little simpletons next?

Groxnorp: Totally! Hey, you know what would be funny?

Flajwok: What’s that Groxy?

Groxnorp: What if we flew down there and put one of those monolith-thingies from that hysterical Kubrick flick in the middle of nowhere for them to stumble across! Then they’d be all like: “Oh no! First a plague, then civil unrest, and now an alien invasion!”

Flajwok: Yes! That’s epic! We should totally do it! But where should we put the thing?

Groxnorp: I dunno. What’s the most innocent, unassuming place on their planet?

Flajwok and Groxnorp (in unison): Utah!!!

Flajwok: Perfect! Pass me a brewski and then let’s take off!

While you may believe that the scenario above is highly unlikely, do you think it is more or less likely than an artist somehow managing to lug tons of metal material and equipment to a location in the middle of the desert that is so inaccessible that the Utah Department of Public Safety said: “It is in a very remote area and if individuals were to attempt to visit the area, there is a significant possibility they may become stranded and require rescue.” I think it is safe to assume that when DPS issued this statement they were speaking of human individuals—clearly, extraterrestrial individuals would need no such help.

I am sure this mystery will never be satisfactorily solved, as Groxnorp and Flajwok have had their laugh and are long gone, very likely now egging a star port in the Andromeda galaxy at this very moment. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. That is why I’m hoping there are no extraterrestrial practical jokers out there who are big fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The last thing we need this year is to have to face off against killer rabbits. That would be so 2020.

My 50th Year - A Tale of Two Ages

 

It seems like just one year ago today that I turned 50, in large part, because it was. As I approached the half century mark last year, I was very anxious. What would it be like to be a 50-year-old man? I knew it was just an arbitrary number, but some numbers packed more significance than others. At 16 you can drive; at 21 you can drink; at 35 you can run for president—even if you have the maturity and intelligence of a toddler. Well what happens at 50? What would an entire year of being a 50-year-old feel like? Well, since that year just ended for me, I’m here to tell you it’s a very mixed bag.

In some ways, my 50^th year felt like two very distinct years. The first half was terrific, whereas the second half felt almost like Armageddon. As I mentioned in some blog posts from that timeframe, one of the great advantages of turning 50 was getting my AARP card. I wielded that piece of plastic like a great swordsman wields…um…a sword. (Metaphors don’t get better at age 50.) Not long after I got my AARP card—okay a day after— I took my wife on a hot date to Denny’s and flashed that thing for a full 15% off! It was glorious!

Yes, the first half of my 50^th year brought with it some carefree days. Not only was I getting an AARP  discount at a handful of select restaurants and retailers, I was also getting AARP The Magazine! The first issue I received had Tom Hanks on the cover! Tom-freaking-Hanks! Maybe being 50 wouldn’t be so bad after all! And then the second half of the year kicked in.

Six months after I turned 50, in mid-March, everything seemed to start going downhill. It was like I became a hermit, staying in all the time—not even leaving my house to go to my office. I stopped going out to eat. I stopped going to the movies. I avoided seeing anyone other than my immediate family in person. I became obsessive compulsive about handwashing. I started doing weird things like hoarding toilet paper and wearing facemasks on the rare occasion that I would venture outside. What was it about the second half of my 50^th year that made me this way? Why did nobody older than me tell me it would be like this?

And now comes 51. What will that year be like? Will it be as schizophrenic of a year as my 50^th was? Only time will tell, but I’ll tell you one thing for certain—I’ve already renewed my AARP membership. I mean Kevin-freaking-Costner was on the cover of the last issue, so why wouldn’t I?

My Greatest Athletic Achievements

Now that professional sports are back in full swing, I find that my thoughts have frequently turned to my own athletic career. While it is true that I never played sports professionally, or collegiately, or high schoolly, it is also true that for three months in my early 20s, I was the fourth best player on a four-person bowling team and once rolled an impressive 137. (I’m pretty sure we still lost that game, despite the fact that my friend’s grandmother, who was the best bowler on our team, rolled a 190.)

As a young lad I, like many of my peers, had delusions of becoming a professional athlete, and it certainly wasn’t bowling that I fantasized about. For me, baseball and football were the objects of my desire, and I played these sports in the streets and schoolyards of Brooklyn on a regular basis. While it’s unclear to me now if it was my lack of discipline, size, or coordination that kept me from going pro, I do have a highlight reel of glorious streetball moments permanently etched into my consciousness.

The earliest all-star moment that I can recall came when I was a tender tot of about eight or nine. A bunch of kids on my block were playing stickball and as was often the case, I was relegated to last in the lineup. I don’t remember if the game started late or if we were having the inevitable endless arguments about the rules, but somehow most of the kids had to go inside before I ever got a turn at bat and eventually the only two people left outside were myself and a girl of about my age named Jodi. We decided to keep on playing, which was fine with me, as I had a bit of a crush on Jodi and wanted to dazzle her with my incredible athletic prowess. After awkwardly swinging and missing on Jodi’s first two pitches, and silently calculating that my chances with her were sinking faster than the Titanic, I finally connected on her third pitch. I watched as the pink Spalding sailed high and fast down the block, past the big tree near the corner and bounced its way down the next block. Jodi gleefully yelled “How did you do that?” and chased after the ball, which ended up being lost, perhaps in a sewer drain. While I lost my ball and the game came to an abrupt end it was, for me, the proudest moment of my young life.

About three years later, on the very same street, I had an epic football moment. I have no recollection of who else was on the playing field with me, although I’m sure Jodi would not have been there at this point, as my previous baseball heroics did not have the lasting impact on our relationship that I had hoped. All I know is that there were probably six of us and my team was on offense. I ran out for a pass racing around in crazy patterns until the quarterback, determining I was open, threw the ball my way. The only challenge was, I was running toward a parked car and the ball was thrown high and behind me. It’s difficult to account for what happened next, other than to say it was all very spontaneous and I wouldn’t be able to recreate it if I tried. I reached for the ball behind me with my hands, while at the same time I straightened my legs and tried to stop short, so as not to overrun the ball. I managed to catch the ball with my body stiff as a board at a 45-degree angle. I did not, however, successfully stop short, since there was no traction on the asphalt. As a result, I managed to fully slide underneath the parked car with the football still firmly in my hands. I don’t know how this looked to the other kids playing, but I know that lying on the ground, with just my head and outstretched arms sticking out from underneath that blue Ford Granada, I felt like I had just made the greatest play in the history of Shore Parkway street sports.

But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I managed to make the streetball play that, to this day, the people inside my head are still talking about. A bunch of guys had gotten together to play football on my friend Tom’s street. We all reeked of teenage male bravado, but none reeked more than Louie, who was a junior and the cockiest kid in our school. He was a long-haired rebel that all the girls swooned over and all the guys wanted to give a stiff right to the jaw. Nobody wanted to be on his team, because he was a ball-hog who would insist every play go through him; but it wasn’t so great to play against him either, because of the constant trash talk you would have to endure the entire game. On this particular day we were on different teams and at one point, late in the game, I caught a short pass and found myself about five yards from the end zone with only Louie in my way. He stood a few feet ahead of me and I knew there would be no way to get past him, so I thought I would throw a lateral back to the quarterback. But as soon as I pulled my arms backward to pitch the ball forward, Louie, thinking he would intercept the lateral and take it all the way back to the opposite end zone for fame and glory, jumped into the theoretical path of the ball before it left my hands. This allowed me to hold on to the ball and trot unscathed into the end zone, as though I planned a fake lateral all along. To this day it’s not so much the cheers of my teammates that I remember fondly, as it is the joyous razzing that Louie had to endure the rest of the game for getting completely humiliated on the playing field.

My illustrious sports career is well behind me now, but I often bask in the glory of these three championship moments as I conveniently forget the several thousand embarrassing moments in between. Here’s to my Hall of Fame career…and my selective memory!

Spontaneous Blog Post

It has been a couple of months since I created a blog post, so I thought I would try something different and write a post completely off the cuff. Usually I labor over my posts for days, sometimes spending hours contemplating a single word. True, many of these hours are actually spent nodding off in front of my laptop and accidentally drooling on my keyboard, but nonetheless, my intentions are pure.

Normally my blog posts are topical, addressing either what is going in the world or my own life when I sit down to write. These days, however, what's going on in the world is too depressing to write about and what's going on in my life is not very much to write about. My days Monday through Friday are pretty much the same. I wake up, shower, and make that long 40-foot commute from my bedroom to my den. Then I work for eight or nine hours, have dinner, watch TV with the family, go to sleep and do it all over again the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But those weekends...oh those wild weekends. On Saturdays and Sundays I usually sleep in a whole hour later than on weekdays. I read. I surf the internet. I eat dinner and watch TV with the family. On Friday nights we watch a movie instead of episodic television. Sometimes we play a board game in the evenings instead of watching TV. It's a crazy time, I tell you! 

Actually, last night something exciting did happen. My wife yelped in surprise and alarm. I was in the midst of feeding the cats at the time, but as any good husband would (or at least should), I immediately ditched the cats to see what caused my wife's cry of distress. It turned out there was a large cricket on the wall behind the television. Alarming though this may have been, it's much better than what usually causes my wife to yelp-- a scorpion sighting. While crickets are larger than scorpions, they are way less lethal, so I dispatched it confidently without fear of being injected with venom. It was quite the adrenaline rush for a Sunday evening.

So goes life in the Schwartzberg household in the surreal summer of 2020. It is a quiet existence punctuated by the occasional critter encounter. Normally I would insert a clever and/or humorous line here to neatly tie up my blog post and end it on a high note, but since I'm writing spontaneously and not spending hours over each word I'll just end it by reassuring you that I did not forget my cats last night after the cricket incident and they were eventually fed. (This, of course, was due to their meows of surprise and alarm brought on by an empty food dish.)

The Strangest Tale of Lockdown Living

Of all the tales of lockdown, today I bring you the one that is perhaps the strangest within the Schwartzberg files: “The Tale of the 13-Year-Old Boy Who Cleaned His Room Without Being Told.”

My oldest son is not what anyone would call a “neat freak.” In fact, he has always seemed to follow the tenets of the Oscar Madison School of Housework; in other words—don’t bother. Letting things fall randomly on the ground—pants, math homework, magazines, three-year-old Halloween candy—seems to be standard practice in the boy’s room. And entering junior high this past year only seems to have increased the gusto with which my son haphazardly tosses crap throughout his lair.

Efforts to have my son clean his room have always met with mixed results. When we tell him to straighten up his room he avoids it for as long as possible before being threatened with loss of screen time. At that point, his “cleaning” basically consists of taking the stuff that was all over the ground and piling it on his desk, shoving it into his closet and hiding it under his comforter. None of the junk ever leaves, it just gets rearranged and within three days it all slowly creeps back out, so his floor is once again a minefield of miscellaneous middle-school mementos, with not an inch of carpet anywhere to be seen.  This is how, despite the fact that the room is no more than 100 square feet, one of our cats once got lost in there, as I detailed in a previous blog entry.

So you can imagine my surprise when one morning, about a week ago, I opened my son’s door to wake him and there was nothing on the floor but furniture and nothing on the furniture but things that were supposed to be there like lamps and a few office supplies. My first thought was that we had been burglarized. But what burglar would take off with mismatched dirty socks and incomplete 7^th-grade Spanish assignments? Then I thought perhaps I was sleepwalking and this was simply a dream.  I pinched myself and said, “Ouch,” and realized I was not dreaming. I wondered if my son even knew his room was clean, so I decided to wake him.

“Hey, dude, wake up,” I whisper-shouted. He replied with a barely audible grunt, opened one eye and looked at me.

“What happened to your room?”

“Huh?”

“Your room. Look at it. What happened here?”

My son propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. At first he looked confused and then memory seemed to return to his groggy mind.

“Oh yeah. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I cleaned it,” he said, laying back down.

“Okay. Well done,” I said, slowly backing out of his room. I didn’t want to make too much of a big deal about it and have him rebel and mess it all up again just to spite me.

As amazed as I was about my son’s middle of the night cleaning escapades, I was more amazed a couple of hours later when he came into the kitchen and grabbed a few trash bags so he could continue to dejunk his already seemingly spotless room. Apparently he had successfully transferred from the Oscar Madison to the Felix Unger School of Housework.

At one point, while my son was lugging a bag of trash down the hallway, I overheard my wife, who was as startled by this turn of events as I, ask him what made him decide to do all this cleaning.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Quarantine makes you do some crazy things.”

Indeed it does. And if this is the kind of thing that happens when my son goes crazy, I’m totally on board with it. Chalk this one up as an unexpected benefit of lockdown.

Completely visible carpet leading up to a bed

My Lockdown Hobbies

About one month into lockdown I feel comfortable that my sanity is in a good place and my risk of going all “Shining” on my family is at a minimum. (This is helped by the fact that we live in a modest three-bedroom house and there is no Room 237.) I’ve found that one of the keys to maintaining a sound state of mind while sheltering in place is adopting some new hobbies.

Listening to classical music is not new to me, but the regularity with which I am doing it is. Somehow, given the gravity of the situation we now find ourselves in, classical music seems like the most appropriate soundtrack. Every day now I give myself a large daily dose of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and the rest of those wig-wearing virtuosos. I particularly like Pachelbel, because if you say his name fast it sounds like you’re saying “Taco Bell” and I enjoy their sauce packets.

Another new hobby that has taken root for me is walking. Of course, I used to walk before the lockdown, but that was a purely utilitarian activity just to get from Point A to Point B. Now I do a specific walk every day—one full circuit around my block that takes me a little over six minutes. It may not sound like much, but of course, I have the added challenge of having to stay at least six feet away from anyone I come across. I come across no one, though, except for one time when I saw a guy coming out of his garage, so I hissed at him and ran away.

There is one hobby I have taken up, though, that has been particularly rewarding, because I can see daily progress. As with any endeavor, when you really put in the work and you can see yourself making significant strides, you feel a real sense of accomplishment. I am, of course, talking about growing facial hair. For the past three weeks I have made a concerted effort to not run a razor across my face. Every day, after I brush my teeth, I look at my razor and shaving cream and actively turn away. And every morning when I get up and look in the bathroom mirror, I see progress being made. At the two week and three day mark I hit a significant milestone when I finally went past the stubble and scruff phases and hit the full-on beard phase. I considered this a major accomplishment since the last time I had a full-on beard was 22 years ago. (For a scintillating account of the history of my facial hair growth, read this blog I wrote in 2013.)

While my beard growing has been seemingly successful, I must report that this particular hobby is not getting universal praise from the rest of the folks on lockdown in this household. While my older son really seems to like this new look (I get the vibe that he thinks the facial hair makes his dad look like less of a man-child) my wife and younger son have been vocal critics. And while the various barbs about my beard being hurled my way by my younger son don’t really bother me (another hobby I’ve taken up over the past month is completely tuning out my kids so I can get work done) the fact that my wife has disdain for my face fuzz is a bit of a concern. After all, she fell in love with a clean shaven gent and now she finds herself cohabitating with a caveman. So, in an effort to keep the peace and avoid my wife being the one to go “Shining” on the rest of us, I’ll probably shave off the beard in the next few days and take up a new hobby. I hear collecting toilet paper is quite popular these days. Maybe I’ll look into that.

Toilet Paper Math

Exactly one week ago I started noticing the various news articles and social media posts about the sudden run on toilet paper that was leading to a shortage of this valuable commodity. It seemed ridiculous at the time, but it also occurred to me that if enough people panic-purchased toilet paper, there would be none left for the non-panicked types like me. And that thought caused a minor panic.

I decided to take a quick inventory of our toilet paper rolls, both active and on deck. We had eight rolls, so we weren’t in imminent need of the stuff. Still, I thought perhaps I should pick up an extra package just to be safe. So the next morning I took a detour on the way to work and stopped at our local Fry’s.

Upon entering Fry’s at about 7:25 A.M. on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, everything looked pretty normal. There weren’t very many customers at this hour and the shelves seemed well-stocked. I decided to pick up a couple of other things we needed on my way to the paper goods aisle. I grabbed bananas, soup, and Ritz crackers (a.k.a. breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and headed toward the back of the store. I turned the corner of my targeted aisle and came upon an interesting scene.

The rows of shelves that are normally happily occupied by a wide variety of toilet paper brands were nearly empty. There were maybe four or five packages left, spread out throughout the shelves. But there was a much larger amount of toilet paper—maybe eight or nine packages— in the shopping cart of a woman in her early 30s standing in front of these sparse shelves. She was having a heated conversation with a woman about twice her age who was holding one package of toilet paper.

Non-hoarder: You know there’s really no need to panic. If everyone just bought the normal amount of toilet paper, we would all have what we need.

Hoarder: I’m not panicking. I just had four rolls of toilet paper at home, so I needed to get more. (Apparently she wanted this woman to believe that she normally buys 60 to 70 rolls of toilet paper at a clip.)

At this point, I quietly slid behind the hoarder to grab a six-pack of Quilted Northern. On a whim, I decided that while I was in this aisle I might as well grab a pack of tissues and paper towels, even though there was still an abundance of those items on the shelves. I grabbed my packs of paper goods and quickly left the aisle, as I was in no way interested in sticking around to see if this TP-argument escalated into a TP-melee.

That was Wednesday. By Friday, of course, everything had changed, as the grocery stores were now entering zombie apocalypse territory. When I went to the store on Friday, I had intended to pick up only a couple of items, but the moment I saw the barren look of all the shelves and the desperate look of all the shoppers, I realized it was in the best interest of the Schwartzberg household for me to pick up anything I could get my hands on that was remotely edible. As I weaved my way through the panicked shoppers I decided to take a peak down the paper goods aisle. We didn’t need any toilet paper, but I was just curious. There was nothing down that aisle.  No toilet paper, no paper towels, no tissues, no napkins. Just empty shelves and a lone tumbleweed.

In the days following this anxiety-inducing shopping excursion I went to a variety of stores to see about the availability of toilet paper, because it occured to me that one day my family will run out. On Saturday I went to Safeway, CVS, and Walgreens, with no luck. On Sunday I went to Fry’s, Target, and Big Lots with no luck. Out of desperation, I decided to check out the 99-cent store, figuring that even though their toilet paper might have visible tree bark in it, it was better than using a wool mitten. But they were empty, as well. The next morning I went to the opposite end of the spectrum and tried Whole Foods—but alas, no toilet paper, vegan or otherwise.

So now it’s down to math. There are currently 14 rolls of toilet paper in our household, with two already started. Each unstarted roll contains 308 sheets of toilet paper. Let’s assume that the two started rolls are about half done, constituting about one roll combined. That means we currently have 13 x 308 = 4,004 sheets of toilet paper. If each person in the household is allotted eight sheets per day, we would need 4 x 8 = 32 sheets daily. With 4,004 sheets available, it would take us just about 125 days before we ran out, or about four months. Of course, if we decrease our intake of fruits and vegetables, and increase our intake of hard cheese and pound cake, we could probably last for an additional month, but that might lead to other issues. In either case, I’m hopeful that our current supply outlasts the great Toilet Paper Famine of 2020.

Now if only we could wash our hands.