“I must be a mushroom because they keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.”
"yum, yum, eat 'em up."
I first encountered the folksy maxim in the bathroom of my friend’s house. He was my first friend, meeting in maybe second grade (maybe first), at the age when friendships grew largely from geographic coincidence (my first friend was actually probably next-door neighbor Katie, though our increasingly divergent maturities and genders, and her eventual and premature death by cancer, makes me consider Matt my first friend, though the writing of this paragraph makes me feel bad about it).
"wanna come over and play?"
Matt lived about two blocks away in a double-headed Allen-wrench direction. His family’s house was old, which I took to mean haunted (my family’s had been constructed on the border of virgin wetland at the behest of my parents, part of the great Mounds View land grab of the mid- ’70s).
everything must go
The antiquity of his home was reinforced by his parents’ own advanced age. My youth prevented me from properly gauging the age of others, but his dad had graying hair and his mom, as the spouse of a gray-hair, took on a perceived elder status of her own (jazzercise classes, though, implied a youthful vigor).
lookin' good
The house was also filled with peculiar wonders of a time and sensibility foreign from my own. Playing cards bearing black-and-white photos of naked women hid in the mahogany desk of a largely unused sitting room bedecked with fabrics and furniture I associated with a generation beyond my own parents. A rusted cylinder push mower powered by nothing more than engineering ingenuity and muscle strain (which strangely made it more fun than the trembling gas-powered version at my own home) sat in the cobwebbed garage, the shelves of which were pancaked with dust. And an embossed plaque in the bathroom declaring the aforementioned phrase while carved, faced mushrooms danced along the plaque’s lower border.
this way to the egress
It’s been a long time since I considered the words of those cavorting mycelium (in the interim I saw my first porno in Matt’s living room [and couldn't stop laughing, much to the irritation of most of the other keen and enraptured boys gathered before the television {my retarded pubescence took faces distorted by pleasure and nonsensical, guttural, ecstatic cries to be closer to a The Three Stooges short than the gateway to primal stirrings}]; I got drunk for one of the first times at Matt’s [and being one of my first drinking experiences, I exaggerated my drunkenness in that ridiculous and obnoxious way endemic to high schoolers {here realized in a disproportionate enjoyment of The Kentucky Fried Movie}, again, to the irritation of others, though Matt quietly dismissed the offended parties' inquiries as to 'what was wrong with him?']; despite drifting apart during the later years of primary and middle school and reconnecting briefly over a shared interest in alcohol [particularly Hot 100] late in high school, Matt and I eventually succumbed to the fatal drift that visits so many childhood friendships [and is superficially breached now via Facebook and its ability to alert you to people's birthdays]) but a couple recent events brought the phrase back to me:
Sadly this deployment of the phrase was a little clunky and exacerbates the folksiness of the wisdom. Still, Tommy Chong; cool guy. And, Mike Huckabee, why the shit do you have a TV show?
busy signal
The words also resonated with me during recent dealings with Verizon during a bout of Internet disconnectivity. Despite a day’s worth of torrential rain and a lightning strike to the fire escape a floor above (resulting in an exploded flowerpot), the Verizon representative to whom I reported the trouble insisted there had been no other reports of Internet outages in my neighborhood and there weather was not likely a factor. A repairman was to be dispatched the next day, in the bay window of 8am to 6pm. By 5:30, no one had showed and I called Verizon. The guy insisted that there had been trouble at one of the company’s hubs and they had to deal with that first and that’s what the computer had told him and that’s all he could tell me.
"sir, the computer is telling me to shoot you."
Then, just after 6, my phone rang. It was a different Verizon guy. He was letting me know that they needed to send someone out tomorrow to fix my problem, would a window of 1-5pm work for me? I pointed out that I had waited 10 hours already (well, Devo had, but we’re engaged and I’m already down with the royal me), that they already said they were sending someone out today. The guy explained that, gee, it seems like they misrouted the call (whatever that means) and he sure is sorry, but would 1-5pm work. I need it as soon as possible, I explained, which he took as a yes. Apparently 1-5pm was the earliest they could get out because they had to get to all the other people they hadn’t managed to get to from yesterday still, which seems to imply there was a widespread problem with the system. Someone’s not being absolutely forthright with me, and I can’t get anyone on the line to give me a straight answer. The guy did come out the next day, about half an hour before that day’s window closed. Apparently I just needed a new modem. And a mushroom farmer.
what can you tell me about FiOS?
Tags: being a dick, childhood, customer service, dribble, friend, say something, verizon
Shrooms = anti-ZOOM.