Dear diary,
Today was the day. The D day. Da D Day. The day my plan finally came into fruition. Which one of them, you ask? The one in which I stand in the middle of the street in downtown Stockholm, and stop all traffic.
There once was a man who couldn’t make decisions. He’d get up in the morning and then dive straight back under the covers.
“It was nice to get up, but it’s even nicer here,” he said to himself. “On the other hand, I can’t stay here all day … or can I?”
Ten minutes later, he got up and stumbled downstairs to kitchen. The rest of his family was already sitting at the table.
“Good morning, everybody,” said the man who couldn’t make decisions. “Oh, that looks good,” he said, pointing to his son’s bowl of cereal.
“And that!” he shouted, and pointed at his wife’s bowl of fruit. “And that!” he said, now looking at his daughter’s toast.
The man who couldn’t make decisions had a bowl of fruit, a bowl of cereal, and a sandwich for breakfast. He pulled up the newspaper his wife had left for him on the table and started to read about a football game two teams had played the day before.
Arianna Huffington, of The Huffington Post, has always done things her way. Now she’s challenging the age-old approach to news. That’s good news for good news.
The other day, I sort of decided to write a blog entry every day for the entire … well, for a while, and I just realized it’s time for me to go to bed, and the page is still blank.
“Caps, T-shirts, and sneakers, that’s what we need,” Wife told me the other day. I was a little surprised because that’s basically the contents of my entire wardrobe, but happy, because if you ask me, everybody needs caps, T-shirts, and sneakers.
Turned out that she wasn’t looking to add more caps, T-shirts, and sneakers into my wardrobe, but to take some out of there so she could send them to the refugees on Lesbos, Greece. Her office works with an organization that delivers clothes and other items to Greece to help the people who have nothing.
Like so many others, we wanted to help, simply because we want to help. Also, I’d like to see our kids become better people than I am and I’d like to see them become human beings who feel empathy, and sympathy, and who act. No, I’m not a sociopath, of course I feel empathy, and sympathy. It’s the last part that’s my weakness, which is why Wife is my hero. She’s a doer.
Anyway, we wanted to show Son and Daughter that everybody can do something.
Believe it or not, I do remember the moment I read the April 1997 issue of the Rolling Stone magazine. I was traveling on business – if you consider government employees’ travel as business – in Newfoundland in Canada. I had just checked in at my hotel in St. John’s and hadn’t had time to finish reading the article on the plane so fighting off the jetlag, I picked up the magazine again.
And this is what I remember: MTV’s trend watchers said that the next big thing would be “good”. Not just a good thing, but that being good, instead of bad, would be the next megatrend in pop. They said they could see signs of the pendulum going from the dangerous Madonnas, and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” towards artists and movies that represented goodness.
I remember it because it surprised me and because I hoped it to be true. Because I considered myself a good guy, a nice guy, and for once, I also wanted that to mean that I was cool as well.
I became a self-taught shaver one summer’s day at the tender age of fifteen when I took a disposable yellow Bic razor and shaved the hair on my upper lip. It had grown to the point where it was no longer cool. Oddly enough, I don’t remember how often I actually shaved going through high school, but I do remember the cool summer breeze hitting my lip when I rode my bike downtown later that day.
I didn’t use any shaving cream, or foam, or gel – I’m fairly confident gel didn’t even exist then – or even soap, and neither did I use any aftershave.
Not even Dad’s Old Spice.
I’m a simple man with simple dreams. I don’t generally think the universe owes me much, and I have no demands to make. And because I think my wishes are small, there’s no need for them to not come true. I’m the kind of guy who’s happy to have just enough milk in the carton for his cappuccino, just enough sunshine to ride my bike into town (and then sit outside for a while), and a decent WiFi connection.
Oh, and the hand.
I do want to see the hand.
You know the hand, it’s the one you see in the car in front you when they’ve passed you on a highway, and the hand you see in your rearview mirror when you’ve passed another car on a highway. The hand that waves at you when you meet a car on a narrow dirt road in the bush, and you let the other car pass first.
That hand.
I’m not much of an inventor, but I’ve always admired inventors, ever since my first glue experiments as a five-year-old. The purpose of the experiment was to see which one of three glues dried up the fastest, and I remember how carefully I held the piece of paper with the samples on my lap on the back seat of our car, on our way to my grandparents’ place, and the playhouse that was my laboratory.
I took the glue samples in, and then promptly forgot about them when I got excited about other things. Such as a football.
A few years later, I carried with me a red hardcover Gyro Gearloose’s Guidebook everywhere, whenever I wasn’t sitting on our balcony with Mom’s old typewriter, copying passages of the guidebook into a book of my own. Turns out I didn’t get any inventions into my brain that way, but it may have put me in a writer’s frame of mind. Also, it was nice out there on the balcony.
Fact: I can’t build anything, and I can’t fix anything. I don’t understand how an engine works, and I don’t know how you can build a bridge across deep waters (although that’s never stopped me from writing about those things) but the desire to invent something is still inside me.
Something. Anything.
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He didn’t know which one of them was the first to not see the other one. One of them had to have seen the other one first because their eyes had never met, which would have been the case had they seen each other exactly the same time.
But they hadn’t.
Now, he had seen him clean the counter of the fast food place, and maybe he had been so focused on his work that he had missed the face of the first customer in line, or maybe he’d seen so many faces that day alone that they all looked sort of the same. And to stand out, it was probably best not to be a middle-aged white male.
