Category: suburbs

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Can you smell what the rock is cooking?

Our yard has always been a disaster; my brother, our neighbors and I used to play soccer out there as kids, leaving it looking a lot like the Sea of Tranquility. When my dad moved back in in 1988, he must have sodded the whole thing, because it looked like a fairway at Augusta for a while. But then it fell into disrepair, and the 30- and 40-foot-high trees make so much shade that grass has never really taken root.

Amy & I have talked for a while about getting some real landscaping done, but I decided to launch a pre-emptive strike yesterday and start beautifyin’ on my own. Little did I realize it would lead . . . to the end of the world!

I decided that several of the trees, with their blast-radius of shade, would be best served by mulch and a ring of rocks. After walking Rufus in the morning, I moved a number of rocks from the backyard to build a little (4-foot diameter) ring around one of the trees by the street. The temperature at 7am was amenable and the work went quickly. So it made perfect Bizarro sense to take a half day from work and build a much bigger ring around an island of trees in the middle of the afternoon when it was 87 degrees!

To be fair, it was exactly one hour of non-stop work, hauling rocks from the backyard and digging out embedded rocks from around that island of trees. I thought, “I sure am glad that I’m a trade magazine editor and not a landscaper!”

I had a funny recollection of my youth during the work. As I tossed some of the heavier rocks in the back yard into my wheelbarrow, they struck each other and gave off a smell of gunpowder. I have no idea if high sulfur content is a unique aspect to rocks around here, or if the rest of you have childhood memories of smashing two rocks together in an attempt at creating an explosion. All things considered, I find it remarkable that I managed not to lose any fingers or suffer brain damage as a kid.

In the front yard, I had to dig out a dozen or so rocks that were embedded in the area that I was trying to ring off. Rather than covering them over, I figured they could be used for the ring itself. The only problem was, some of these rocks were iceberg-like, with significant mass buried under the surface. I was able to pivot some of them along the ground out to the perimeter. To others, I said, “Screw you; you’re staying. Enjoy the mulch, bitches!”

I noticed that these had more lichen on them than the others, but again, I have no idea what that means. Outside of the fact that I live in the wake of a glacier’s retreat.

But it wasn’t these lichenous rocks that portended the end of the world. Nor was it the gunpowder-laden stones and their promise of Pinto-bumper explosions. It was The Hidden Rock.

While digging, I hauled up a large ovoid rock that was half-out of the ground. It was heavy, but not impossible to lift. Looking at it, I discovered that it had several long fissures on its surface. Already inspired by my childhood, I concluded the best thing to do would be to throw it down on another rock and wish that I was wearing my safety-glasses.

And the rock shattered. Well, it didn’t actually shatter; what shattered was the exterior shell of the rock. Like some fragile matrushka doll, what remained was a smoother rock (upper right), marred slightly by the impact that freed it, beside the shards of its carapace:

Sure, I’m given to flights of fancy and maybe there’s an easy geological explanation for this occurrence. But it’s clear to me that I discovered

a) one of the sefirot, surrounded by one of the qlipot,

b) the egg of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent,

c) a meteor,

d) an early, failed attempt at the M&M concept,

e) a prehistoric spaceship, bearing small rocky people from their doomed planet, or

f) the Philosopher’s stone, which was never found because no one ever looks in New Jersey.

All we can know for sure is that it now helps round out the ring of rocks in my front yard, and that I really need to drink more water before working out in the yard in August.

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Fall of the Mall

Yesterday’s WSJ had a neat article about the bankruptcy of cheap-chic clothing retailer Steve & Barry’s. It explores the practice of malls essentially paying S&B’s to open up shop in large, unoccupied spaces. This subsidy tied into the company’s business of “nothing above $9.98”. Sez the Journal:

For mall owners, large anchor spaces, which were once occupied almost exclusively by department stores, are especially important. Their role is to draw lots of shoppers into malls, enabling owners to rent their smaller spaces to specialty stores. When anchor spaces go dark, clauses in the leases of smaller tenants often permit them to pay lower rents.

This led the company to go from 31 stores in 2004 to 276 stores by this year. It looks like the company came to rely on the upfront payouts from mall owners, which fueled a rapid expansion in new stores, which fueled a greater need for more upfront payouts (esp. as the economy slowed and sales dropped), which fueled rapider expansion, which. . .

Well, you can guess what happened; the company went bankrupt a few weeks ago. The story’s a little more complicated, and also touches on the company’s celebrity-branding strategy, including its Sarah Jessica Parker line, “Bitten.”

I found the article pretty compelling, despite the fact that I’d never bought anything in one these stores. Still, I like to try to gain an understanding of how retail works, and sometimes fails to, while also trying to grok what the ebb and flow of different types of stores and product mixes says about us as consumers. For the moment, access to the article is free, so check it out.

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Long and Vending Road

When I was a kid, my family took roadtrips down to Disney World around Thanksgiving. We rolled down the highway in a Country Squire station wagon, and I recall our two big stops being Pedro’s South of the Border, where we bought fireworks, and one of the highway rest areas in Maryland, the name of which escapes me. Sadly, the only name I held onto from all those rest areas was the evocative and menacing Cheesequake, but that was in NJ.

The one in Maryland was special, because it had a comic-book vending machine. For geeks like me and my brother, this was gold. By the time we would hit Maryland, we’d have finished all our comics anyway, so there was a thrill to picking up something new, even if our choice was limited to the few selections at the front of each shelf. The only comic I remember buying from one of these machines was an issue of Logan’s Run. Never any X-Men or Fantastic Fours, as I recall, but maybe I’m just rewriting childhood to make it seem like a life of privation.

Why do I bring this up? Well, during last Wednesday’s Scavenger Hunt of the Soul, I came across this:

That’s right: an iPod vending machine. And I wasn’t even in Japan! This was in the Macy’s department store at the Garden State Plaza here in NJ! I had to check it out, if only to see whether users are limited to credit/gift cards, or if there’s a slot to put $100 bills in. Sadly, there were no cash purchases.

Seriously: a vending machine for $300-$400 MP3 players, as well as high-end B&O headphones and the very camera I used to take this picture!

Living in the future sure is fun!

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Scavenger Hunt of the Soul

Aaaaaand we’re back!

Many apologies for going two whole days without a post, dear readers! I was a tad burned out Tuesday after I wrapped up the Top Companies issue of my mag. I thought about posting my From the Editor page or a picture of me lying next to an empty bottle of Plymouth Gin, but then I realized that I was even further from my right mind than I was after landing in San Diego at 3am last month.

For those of you keeping score at home, the problem with my office computer turned out to involve a faulty logic board, but the repair service hadn’t diagnosed that until right before July 4th. When they quoted the cost of replacing it, our IT dept. realized that it would be cheaper to buy me a new computer and just copy my old hard drive’s contents onto it. So I’ve spent this morning cleaning up files and importing bookmarks, mail and iTunes settings on a brand-new 20″ iMac. Since I was on a 17″ model before, this is a sweet upgrade.

So that’s what was waiting for me at the office this morning. In fact, it was waiting for me yesterday morning, but I decided that a vacation day was the better part of valor, having worked through the previous two weekends and the July 4th holiday to get this ish together. I’m at a point in my life and career where I’ll never take all the vacation, personal and comp days allotted to me in a year, so all I can do is pick a day here and there and fail to show up at work.

So what did I do with my first non-work day in more than a month? Well, this would hardly be the Virtual Memories you’ve come to know and love without a little quotidian magic.

Since the official VM wife still had to go to work, the day started at our usual 5am. After the routine of coffee, reading the newspapers online, and feeding and walking Rufus, I slumped down on my chaise longue, picked up a copy of Orwell’s essays, and read Marrakech, because that’s what I opened to. I luxuriated in his clean, wonderful prose, thought about how poorly my pharma-profiles were in comparison, and decided not to think about the issue for the rest of the day.

(That said, I didn’t write anything as bizarre as, “Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive. In fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce,” so maybe the issue won’t turn out to be that bad. . .)

Instead, I spent a few minutes deciding whether I should go to the Yankees 1pm game against the Devil Rays. I went online to check for day-of-game tickets and discovered that I could get a really awesome seat . . . for only $400! No, that’s not a misprint; we live in an age where one ticket to a mid-season baseball game can run you $400.

There were cheaper options available, but as I looked over the seats and thought about the purpose of A Day Off, it occurred to me that fighting New York traffic, searching for parking (the new stadium construction has removed some of the previous parking lots) in the Bronx, and sitting in an uncomfortable seat on a day in the high 80s with stifling humidity might not be the best way for me to decompress. Perhaps, I thought, I’d be better off watching the game at home and having a beer that cost less than $8.

Having eliminated one northern NJ option, I returned to my chaise, picked up paper and pen, and pursued another: mall-hopping! I composed a to-do/shopping list, plotting out the stops I’d have to make in and around Paramus, the Nexus of All Malls. I know that taking care of a bunch of errands and walking through a couple of malls and home-furnishing stores may not be everyone’s idea of a nice day off, but that was my comfort food. (As was a little shopping on Amazon: 3 volumes of Cromartie High School and a copy of Camp Concentration by Tom Disch, about whom, more later.)

I’d have preferred to spend the day a-couch, reading in the morning and writing in the afternoon, but I’d spent far too many days at home working on this issue. It was as though the familiar scenery was temporarily overlaid with a dull haze that only reminded me of the last weeks’ labors. I needed to get away, if only for a few hours. Plus, there’s a lot of pollen and dog hair everywhere, and I just couldn’t raise the will to clean.

So I set out at 9:30am, a lengthy but not over-ambitious list in hand. I started out by getting my mid-morning coffee at a Starbuck’s in Garden State Plaza. I drank a tall Pike Place and read a third of The Dunwich Horror on my Kindle as I waited for the shops to open. Then I ambled through the mall, sorting through the signals and noise of the storefronts, trying to divine messages in the retail ether. At one store, I noticed the soundtrack was Lost in the Supermarket by the Clash. I bought several skin care products. This probably makes me sound like Patrick Bateman, but hey.

By the time I finished at the mall, I found that my nerves were shot when I had to talk with cashiers. Speaking to anyone seemed to require great effort; the last few weeks have obviously taken a toll on me, and I can only imagine how tough I made it for my wife. It’s a good thing she understands me better than anyone else does. And it’s a good thing Rufus doesn’t have standards, either!

After Garden State was wrapped up, I hit a nearby strip mall for coffee and electronics. Walking through Circuit City, I marveled over all the empty space, a floorplan designed for row upon row of cathode ray TVs now populated by inch-thin LCDs and plasmas, lights dimmed to enhance the screens’ color contrast. The store was like a dinosaur. I searched through the store for a 500gb external hard drive and a Sirius radio antenna. Crossing them off my list, I thought, “I’m on a scavenger hunt.”

Checking out, the clerk didn’t ask the standards electronics-store questions: Do you want the warranty? Can I have your phone number and zip code? I’d been reading that the chain was in trouble for a while now, but it hit home then that this company won’t be around in another year or two.

I didn’t feel sad about that. Not the way I do when I pass the old Tower Records location, a few miles up the highway. It’s not that I bought so much music there, but I always found the store to be a sort of cultural oasis in the NJ retailscape, with its loud, obscure music, alt.magazine selection, and snobbish videostore clerk who probably thought he sounded like Peter Lorre, but really just sounded like Jon Lovitz.

After Tower went bankrupt, another business was going to open on the site, but it’s been about two years and the shell is still empty. I don’t know why it never opened, but the reversed sign of “HARDBODIES GYM” is still set up outside the building. I always get a little wistful when I pass the old store. I wanted to write a post about it called The Fall of Tower, but this is all you get.

From the strip mall, it was on to Crate and Barrel and West Elm (no luck finding a picture frame that could accommodate a piece of original comic-book art) and then Trader Joe’s, where I picked up Rufus’ lower-grade dog-treats. I can’t always give him the top-shelf stuff!

By then it was time to call my accountant, to drop off some papers in Hackensack. I told his secretary that I’d be there in around 10 minutes. Somehow, that actually came true, with Rts. 17 and 4 parting for me like the Red Sea before the Israelites. Actually, there are probably more Jews living in New Jersey than there were during the Exodus.

The drive took me past several closed furniture stores. I wonder how much cheap Chinese competition has affected that industry. Not enough to dent Ikea, the last place I hit on the way home (yay, picture frame!). Funny thing about life up here: it turned out that having an Ikea near Newark Airport wasn’t convenient enough for northern NJ, so a second one was opened 10 miles north of it. Of course, it turns out that having two over in NJ isn’t convenient for New Yorkers, so a third Ikea recently opened in Brooklyn.

Similarly, my wife’s from a small town in Louisiana, and I thought it was funny when I once looked up the retail locations for the Apple store and discovered that there isn’t one. In the entire state. We have seven within an hour’s drive, not including the ones in New York City.

I hit a fancy/strange supermarket to finish up my day’s shopping, then made it home by 12:30pm, in time to heat up some Praeger-burgers and crack open a beer before the start of the Yankees game. I took a nap between the 5th and 9th innings. They won in the 10th.

But all you care about is the final tally:

Anthony Oil Free Facial Lotion SPF 15 – C. O. Bigelow – $31

Pre-Shave Oil – The Art of Shaving – $22

Grass-scented Soap, 2 bars – Sabon – $6.67 each

Linen Shirt – J. Crew – $17 (marked down from $75)

Jamaican Joe’s Coffee Beans, 2 Lbs. – Chef Central – $8.99/lb.

MyBook 500gb External Hard Drive – Circuit City – $99

Sirius Satellite Radio Vehicle Antenna – Circuit City – $39 (Rufus chewed through the cable of the old one)

Thai Lime & Chili Cashews – Trader Joe’s – $5.69

Oatmeal & Honey Soap – Trader Joe’s – $1.29

Natural Assorted Flavor Dog Biscuits – Trader Joe’s – $2.99

Ribba Picture Frame – Ikea – $14.99

Leksvik Coatrack – Ikea – $9.99

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You ain’t nothing but a sight-hound?

Our experience with Rufus has been pretty awesome. Outside of his inclination to bring home every tick in Ringwood — Amy thinks it’s because they keep mistaking him for a deer — we don’t really have much to complain about. I’m still afraid to leave him on his own in the house for a day, because I think he’ll get bored and start chewing on furniture, but he doesn’t seem to mind being in his crate while I’m at the office, so that’s alright. He’s been well-behaved on walks, didn’t react when a 1-year-old trundled over and tapped him on the nose this weekend, and has only peed in the house once since his first week with us.

One oddball trait of his, though, is his need to “protect the house.” Sometimes when he’s sleeping or resting in the living room, he’ll react to the sound of car-doors closing, getting up and barking. We think he’s trying to keep us safe, but he may just be jealous of other people getting to ride in cars. Yesterday evening, he did something even stranger.

Rufus was KTFO on his bed while Amy & I were reading. He suddenly got up, sniffed, and began barking to beat the band. This time, he was so agitated that he tried climbing over me onto the loveseat. We don’t let him on the furniture, and he hasn’t tried to get onto any since his first few weeks here. But he pushed and strained to look out the big window in the living room.

He ran down the hall of the house, barking away. Neither of us had heard any noise that would have woken him up, so I decided to take him outside to show him that there was nothing going on. He ran down the stairs and waited at the door, tail wagging.

Outside, he took one sniff and led me around the side of the house. I heard some leaves and branches being stomped, and figured he’d caught wind of a deer. We get ’em all the time out here, so I was surprised that he reacted so strongly. I walked him to the edge of the woods behind our home, listened for the noise and tried to peer through the trees to see his quarry.

And that’s when I saw the bear.

It was gallumphing down the hill, not too rapidly, but he was obviously not happy about hearing Rufus’ barking earlier. For his part, Rufus didn’t make any moves to drag me into the woods, content to stand in the bear-free yard.

“Good dog?” I asked.

Back inside, Amy & I decided that, yes, this constituted “good dog” behavior. Oh, and that we’ll pay very close attention to our boy when we take him out hiking on trails, especially during bear season.

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It’s such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with me

Today I decided to have lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, A Mano, an upscale Neapolitan pizza place in Ridgewood, NJ. I got there around 2pm, in the midst of a typhoon (nice day to start our Friday summer hours: 50 degrees and pouring). I opened the door, and saw there wasn’t a single customer inside. A waitress stepped out from the back office. I asked, “You open?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”

I sat down at a table, ordered my favorite pizza (the A Mano: bufula mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, arugula, cherry tomatoes, shaved gran cru, and extra virgin olive oil), watched the cook head over to the wood-burning oven to get my pie started, and listened to nobody.

I thought, “Of the top 10 things I love in this world, I have to include

  1. fantastic NJ pizza and
  2. not having to listen to another human being.”

The pizza didn’t take them too long. It was as wonderful as I expected. As I finished it, the waitress came by to ask if I needed anything.

I should’ve asked her to play a Sam Cooke CD on an infinite loop. That’s about the only way the moment would’ve been better.

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Mini Driver

I worked at home today, dear readers, in anticipation of a visit from James Maloney & Son Tree Service. In addition to getting The Raccoon Lodge removed, we contracted a whole lot of other work with them, removing some smaller trees from the front yard, getting a couple of hazardous ones removed from the side of the house, cutting too-low limbs from the big trees to get some sunlight onto the yard, and sawing down some stumps so we can begin the nefarious second phase of Operation: Livable Back Yard.

Since I’d be at home, I took Amy to the bus stop today. It’s a quirky logic, but we’re a quirky couple. Anyway, about 10 minutes before the tree guys were to arrive, I thought, “Hmm. Amy’s Mini is sitting right in the driveway, and I bet they’re going to need to get past that in order to take care of a lot of this work.”

Unfortunately, her car’s a stick-shift, and I’ve never actually driven a stick-shift, outside of the one time she tried to teach me in the bus-stop parking lot. Oh, and the time when I was 16 and my pals Jon-Eric & Todd tried to teach me, before we headed to the Kinnelon Cinema to see The Running Man.

I dug deep into that 1987 version of me and tried to recreate the experience of zooming around the parking lot of my high school, but it was to no avail.

Then I looked again into that geeky high school soul and discovered inspiration from another artifact of that era: the Miller/Mazzucchelli 7-issue run of Daredevil! In particular, I recalled this set of panels from the final installment, in which our blind superhero must get behind the wheel of a car:

Emboldened, I went out to Amy’s Mini, took off the emergency brake, put it in neutral, let it roll down to the bottom of the driveway, tried several times to get it to start, tried several times to get it in gear, and eventually made my way up into the garage!

(Where I, um, stalled out and had to push it in the rest of the way so I could close the garage door…)

(Oh, and, before-and-after pix of the yard are pending…)

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I’ll milk this joke for all it’s worth

In the month that he’s lived with us, we’ve come up with several nicknames for Rufus. His ruthlessness with his plush friends has made him “The Toya Destroya,” while his ability to pee for 10 minutes at a time earned him the sobriquet of “Austin Powers.”

I just discovered his second tick in three days — it’s currently taking a dip in Lake Isopropyl — so I’ve decided that Rufus, following in Prince Harry’s footsteps, will now be known as the “Ginger Tick Magnet.”

Tick #1 was enough of a signal for me to buy a 3-pack of Frontline Plus for Dogs. Reading over the labeling, I discovered that the product “can also be used for the treatment and control of flea, tick and chewing lice infestations on breeding, pregnant and lactating bitches.”

And in a happy coincidence, Shoot ‘Em Up is our next Netflix DVD!

* * *

Bonus dog cuteness!

I didn't do it

“I didn’t do it!”

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The Raccoon Whisperer

Last week, I wrote about the raccoon who took up residence in a tree stump in my backyard. I came up with several theories to explain its presence there. He may have been:

  1. rabid,
  2. the reincarnation of Abin Sur,
  3. a MOVE-like squatter, or
  4. the victim of a Nigerian time-share scam.

The animal’s sluggishness and lack of response to having a rock tossed into its nest left me to conclude that it was dying. However, as one of my coworkers pointed out, the raccoon probably took up residence because it needed somewhere to birth its babies. It’s that time of year for them. I guess there’s some sort of symbolism in my seeing decay and death while other people see life, but maybe that’s just my zombie-fixation showing.

So on Monday evening I called the local animal hospital to find out the protocol for dealing with this guy, and that led me on the merry chase of calling the police’s non-emergency line, then the animal control facility in a nearby town, and ultimately The Wildlife Rehabilitator.

TWR, who lives in my town, confirmed the likelihood of my coworker’s prognosis on Tuesday morning: Raccquel Raccoon was likely getting ready to spawn little raccoon kids. “So, um, what do we do about that? Because I’m really not ready to start a family. I mean, I just got a dog!”

She told me that her daughter, who handles varmint-evictions, would call and check out the scene in the stump. She said, “She used to handle animal control in the town, until the other party took over after the election. They fired her after 8 years. And she’d done a great job. She was even working with the Mine People [a.k.a. the Jackson-Whites] on a spay/neuter program!”

“She was gonna spay and neuter the Jackson-Whites? That is AWESOME!”

“. . . Anyway, the fee to remove a raccoon is $175. But if she has babies, then it’s $225, because we have to house them together while they’re rehabilitated.”

“House them? Seriously? I was figuring I’d have to pay you for a burlap sack, some bricks and a length of twine.”

“Sir?”

“Well, it’s not like raccoons are an endangered species or something. . .”

“We take our job very seriously! These animals need to be rehabilitated before we let them out in the wild.”

Great: now I was stuck envisioning this raccoon in a group session at a rehab clinic with Britney, Lindsay and Amy Winehouse. I thought about sparing Raccquel that fate by borrowing one of dad’s rifles and drilling her. Then I thought about the possibility of a ricocheting bullet catching me in the throat and killing me, and how people would laugh because I was too cheap to call in The Wildlife Rehabilitator and her daughter, The Raccoon Whisperer, to take care of things. [Note: Of course, when I told Dad about this situation, he volunteered to come over and shoot Raccquel. I still would’ve ended up getting hit by a ricochet.]

I told her to go ahead and set it up. She didn’t call back for the rest of the week, so I started thinking of what amount of Kevlar I’d need to wear to feel safe. Then I thought about calling in a stump-grinder to take care of Raccquel’s home, without telling him that the raccoon was living there. Then I thought about the premise of Bosom Buddies and feared that Raccquel would take up residence in my attic or boiler room, dressed in drag.

With enough other stuff going on at work, I was able to put off thinking too much about the situation. Friday morning, TWR called to say that she and TRW were in my neighborhood, and would check out the situation with Raccquel. I was convinced that they took a few extra days in hopes that she’d have given birth, earning themselves an extra $50. It was to no avail. They called, live from the stump, to tell me that Raccquel was there, alone, and that they’d get her out that morning.

“I forgot to mention; watch out for the dog-crap. That’s how Rufus & I discovered this whole thing, after all.”

When I got home that night, there was no sign of my tenant in the tree stump, nor any struggle and zombified animal control staff, so I figure that things went smoothly, and Raccquel was safely in rehab, learning that opening people’s trash cans is just a cry for help.

Au revoir, raton laveur!

* * *

Coda: Friday evening, I took Rufus out for his bathroom break, and noticed a policeman walking in the woods behind my neighbor’s house (and mine).

“What’s going on, officer?” I called out.

He looked up, saw me, and said, “Get your dog inside! There’s a bear somewhere down the hill!”