A Rain of Frogs

A young boy in the west end of Toronto stepped off an elevator and trudged outside. He looked about seven, though maybe a bit short for that age. He was wearing a tuque with the Canadian National logo knitted into its polyester yarn pattern, and had a red knitted Montreal Canadiens (they had just won the cup the previous season and looked to be good again.) scarf around his neck. Brown bell-bottom corduroy, worth thin and pale at the knees. Black rubber boots. He pushed the heavy glass door open, and was greeted by another younger looking boy wearing similar attire.

They exchanged words in quiet whispers, then turned and walked side-by-side onto the baseball diamond that belonged to the building complex. They walked past other boys their age, waving or stopping to have a quick visit, but never wavering from their straight line course past third base.

Behind the baseball field was a shallow ravine, barely a ditch, populated with large leafless trees. The ditch was the boundary between this apartment complex and the lower-class, poorer one next door. Mostly older children and teenagers hung out here and smoked, out of site of balconies and parents. Sometimes they smoked pot, or looked at Playboy magazines, or made out with their girlfriends.

When the boys arrived at the ravine they found themselves alone, which suited them just fine. They pulled off their hats and scarves – it was warmer in the ravine- and dropped them onto the drying leaves which the fall winds hadn’t yet managed to sweep away. Uncovered, the resemblance was uncanny. The boys, who were obviously cousins or brothers, nodded solemnly to themselves and lit clumsily the cigarettes they had stolen.

A short while later boys could be seen racing across the baseball diamond back toward the buildings, frantically pulling their hats back on and wrapping their scarves tightly around their necks. They ran without laughing or stopping to talk to their friends, back through the door, and in.

Later, it was determined that the fire had started in the ravine, probably through the inattentiveness of smoking teenagers. Fortunately the fire had been stopped before the dumpsters had caught fire – that would have necessitated evacuating the entire smaller apartment complex, and there could have been injuries or deaths.

The boys had watched, rapt and fascinated by such things like all boys, as the fire trucks desperately pumped water onto the burning trees, watched as the black smoke billowed up into the sky, even higher than the balconies they watched from. Their parents tousled their hair and told them that was why playing with fire was so dangerous, and that they knew the boys were good boys, and would never do anything like that.

Keeping secrets is dangerous. They can be locked in a watertight box and wrapped it in plastic and tossed down the well of the subconscious – out of sight, out of mind – only to find out years later that it’s been leaking poison into the well the whole time. Sometimes it’s better to fish around in the well and find the decaying box wrapped in its tattered bag, and haul it up into the sunlight where it can be made to account for itself.

At some point in life, everyone comes to the conclusion that society as a whole is a nut job. Usually this comes hot on the heels of some major emotional stress, a breakup, a company going bankrupt, the election of a God fearin’ incompetent President for the second time. Whatever. Eventually everyone gets the idea.

Most people manage to ignore this revelation. “Yes,” they say, “society is freaking mental. But there’s so much good about it.” From this point they go through the twelve step settlement program and manage to live contentedly ever after. That’s not going to work for me.

I try. Oh my god do I try. I try all the time, in this institution. And I pray…

Wait a minute. I don’t pray. Had a little Linda Perry moment there, but I’m back.

What I am trying to get at is that this urge to drop out, just get gone, keeps coming back to me. I am one of those who will never settle. I can’t just ignore the idiocy of a society that is intent on killing itself in the name of big screen televisions and one pound hamburgers. Or nuking people in other countries because we don’t like the way they sell oil.

I’m ready to bail. I’m no neo-hippie so fresh from college that my birkenstocks still have treads on them. I’ve got a family I like, and a job I sometimes like, and friends I usually like, and all sorts of things that should keep me tied down that I don’t like so much.

I’m just tired of the trap. It’s like one of those optical puzzles, once you see it, you can never unsee it. And I’ve seen the trap. The way the ubiquitous “they” make you feel like you’ve got to do just a bit more. A 53-inch television HAS to be better than a 52-incher, right?

But I’ve seen the trap, and lie awake at night hating it.

I’ve seen how people compare their lives to the lives of those on Friends. I’ve seen how wrapped up in Desperate Housewives people can get – so wrapped up that they seem incapable of distinguishing reality from television any more. Nobody can live those television lives, but people try.

I lie awake at night and hate that too.

They think it will make them happy, but all it does is make them feel inadequate. Deep down they know its not the right way. That they know this makes them feel bad. Why can’t they have Rachel’s life? They have the hair, and the killer body and the witty one-liners. They have the strappy shoes and the perfect smile. They have everything she does, so why aren’t they as happy as her?

I’m getting closer and closer to being gone. I can see the trap, but like a non-practicing Catholic, I haven’t been able to completely shake the dogma. I’m not 100% sure yet, but its coming. Living the way I am is wearing me out. Threadbare soul. Moth-eaten spirit.

And I think to myself, I’m going to push off the pier, hoist some canvas over my head, point the bow at the sunrise and say good day to the trap.

Only then can I finally get to sleep.

What the hell is Apple going to do when the iPod bubble bursts? Surely there is a limit to the number of new features Apple can add to the iPod before it traverses the gap between sublime and ridiculous?

The iPod Nano was, without a doubt, a masterpiece. The iPod form factor perfected, even if the capacity is currently too low. It built on the miniaturization of thee iPod mini and it’s fantastic click-wheel to give us a truly perfect music player experience.

Now we have larger screens on the new iPods, and they can play video. That’s all fine and well, though I am curious about the demand for such features. Do people really want to download television programs and watch them on the larger but still miniscule screen on an iPod?

They may. I wondered for a long time about the purpose of the iPod, and it was only when I finally had one in my possession that I realized the impact it would have on my music-listening. Perhaps it will be the same with video on iPods.

This doesn’t change the fact that Apple has no other product of merit available right now. The iPod line is floating the company (admittedly with a great deal of vigor) while its line of once-groundbreaking laptops and desktops grow stale on the shelf waiting for a transfusion from Intel.

What would Apple do if (and when, in my opinion) the iPod bubble bursts and it hasn’t completed its transition to Intel based systems? Will this video strategy bridge the gap for Apple, or will history record it as a mockery of the elegance that was the iPod?

I’ve finally put my finger on it, and distilled it down into a nice simple statement:

Virtually every product of humanity conceived of in the last 100 years lacks grace.

Television has all the grace of a cudgel to the back of the head, and radio before it, was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Marketing today, whether online, on television, billboards (have you see these lately? Talk about overload) anywhere. No grace. No elegance.

Powerboats, fast cars, pickup trucks, hybrid cars, just in time shipping, broadband internet connections, web design. All of these things are a result of maximum mental firepower: in effect, hitting the problem with a thick stick till it stops moving.

I’m tired of it. You’re tired of it. It’s killing us, smothering us in maximum profit curves.

It’s time for some elegance.

Once there was a boy. He was a lonely boy, who never really seemed to connect with the rest of the world. This disconnect troubled his family, who worried about him but didn’t know how to reach him.

The boy was smart. The boy did very well in school. The boy excelled at music. In the summertime he raced bicycles and in the winter he raced on downhill skis. He didn’t win all the time, but often enough that people payed attention.

The boy never really seemed to be attached to the rest of the universe, which spun on (as it will) with or without him. This bothered many people, but it never really bothered the boy, who knew nothing else.

There was another boy. Like the other boy, this boy was smart, and did well in school. Like the other boy, this boy was lonely, and disconnected from the rest of the world.

This boy was not a skier, nor a cyclist. He was a gifted guitarist, and artist – good enough that people payed attention. But to this boy, the most of the outside world always seemed to be spinning on a different axis than him. This didn’t bother him, since he never really knew anything different.

Once there was a girl. She was smart, and did well in school. She was pretty, outgoing, and sociable. She did well in sports, field hockey and basketball being her favorites.

To others, she seemed a model teenage girl. She got into trouble, like all teenagers do, but she never got into serious trouble, and had always given thought to the consequences before getting involved. But she sometimes felt, at the edges of her mind, that she was not truly attached to much that existed outside her.

The girl knew both boys, though she knew they didn’t know each other. She often believed that she was one of the few things either of them connected with.

The girl also felt deeply connected to both of them. She loved them, and was deeply in love with both of them, though she doubted in her secret heart whether anything would come of that – she’d never be able to choose. They both fascinated her, their differences as individuals, and their striking similarities.

Late at night, when the snow would fall and muffle the sounds of the city outside her bedroom window, she would lie awake and wonder what would happen if the two boys ever met. Would they see themselves in the other, or would they pass each other, like ships in the night, barely a ripple of effect on the other?

Eventually she would close her eyes, and drift off to sleep with one final thought. Either way, she would always be the sea in between.