Every November on Thanksgiving Day, misty-eyed Americans reflect on all of the reasons that they have to be thankful for being alive. Sometimes on days like today, I feel a little guilty giving thanks for everything that’s going right in my little corner of the world when there is so much human suffering to be found everywhere else. Mumbai especially comes to mind for me on this Thanksgiving day.

So instead of subjecting you to a trivial, self-indulgent list of things that make me happy, why I don’t I just bitch a while about trivial things that piss me off? Somehow, I think, this kind of exercise strikes closer to the heart of things.

Here is my list of petty grievances, organized in no particular order.

• The misuse of Amber Alert signs, utilized for the purpose of breaking people’s balls. The Amber Alert Program was enacted in 2002, enabling law enforcement agencies to quickly disseminate information about time-critical child abduction cases. Many Amber Alert signs have been erected near highways all over the United States.

  


  

  When used properly, these signs display critical information about kidnapped children and their suspected abductors. More often than not, however, these signs display public service slogans designed to nag you and to remind you of your duties as a responsible driver. During most major holidays, the signs command you to “Report Drunk Drivers – Call 911″. Every Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo, the signs remind you that “Fireworks Are Illegal”. And on ordinary days, the signs pester you with “Click It Or Ticket” or “Don’t Speed – Save Lives”. Just once, couldn’t the people controlling those signs either post something positive or festive like “Happy Holidays”, or just turn off the damned signs? And don’t even get me started on the Schwarzenegger administration’s proposal to post advertisements on Amber Alert signs to generate revenue for the state of California.




• Dim traffic signal lights with bad visibility from varying ranges. While we’re on the subject of driving, I hate those traffic signal lights covered with glossy lenses that make the entire strip of lights appear to be shut off until you drive within a certain proximity of a traffic intersection. I tried to do some research online before writing about these lights, but I came up with nothing. I don’t have an official term for the offending lights, and I don’t understand the science behind the lenses, but what I do know is that they are ridiculous hazards.

  Most traffic signal lights in the United States are bright and visible, day or night, from any reasonable distance or angle. But there is an obnoxious handful of traffic signal lights on the road that are equipped with these terrible glossy lenses that make all of the colors look dim, and you don’t know whether you should stop or drive through until you’ve almost entered the intersection. “Stop” and “Go” are two concepts that should not be equivocated so easily.

  


• Crowd participation. There’s nothing I hate more about attending a live musical performance than being pressured into clapping along with a beat. I’m not trying to crap on the value of shared experiences, but I’m sorry: crowd participation is bullshit. I didn’t leave my house to act as a ghetto metronome; I’m here to be entertained. Clapping along with a song is tedious, and pretty much every crowd grows tired of the game midway through any song. I predict that shit and roll my eyes every time audiences start it up, and I’m always right. I clap my hands only when I believe that I’ve been given a reason to.




• Gratuitous live, on-location reporting by television news journalists. The news is a highly time-sensitive subject. It makes sense that so many TV news journalists report live from remote locations, because sometimes you don’t have all of the facts until just a few minutes before you go on the air. What I find irritating, though, is the culture of television journalism that emphasizes the importance of reporting live and on the scene at all possible times, even when it’s not relevant to do so. In my television-viewing lifetime, I have witnessed such bullshit as a local news correspondent reporting live and on the scene at 11 o’clock at night from some vacant, outdoor venue where an important event happened twenty years ago. I don’t understand this phobia that news agencies have of allowing their correspondents to comment on recorded images while they sit comfortably in the broadcasting studio.


Problems with audio/visual feeds and disruptions by obnoxious bystanders would greatly reduce if these TV professionals would just broadcast from behind a desk more often.




• Astrology. It’s difficult to understand how so many intelligent people can buy into the concept that objects in outer space have a direct effect on the personalities and behaviors of human beings. We’re talking about objects occupying space hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth. How the hell does the alignment of planets have any impact on my development as a person? If you believe that the positioning of planets at the moment of my birth is an indicator of what’s to come throughout my adulthood, then I contend that the arbitrary positioning of objects on Earth at the moment of my birth also plays a significant role on who I will become.

  I think it bears mentioning that when I was born, my father’s Buick Regal was parked 58 meters away from the hospital entrance. It is because of this fortuitous positioning of my father’s car that I will be a generous person with a sunny demeanor and a strong propensity for juggling, ventriloquism, and taxidermy. Had my father parked 57 meters away from the hospital entrance, I would have been a surly, cranky asshole who hates everything and everybody. I really dodged the proverbial spooky-superstitious-matter-and-space-altering-cosmical-tarot-death-card-Scorpiquarius-Year-of-the-Rat-Gemini’s-Twin-Little-Dipper bullet. Thank Zeus! I mean, I don’t believe in anything else that came out of Greek mythology, but I inexplicably accept this dubious correlation between celestial bodies and human bodies.




• DVD commentary banter containing spoiler alerts. I’m a special features geek. I watch a fair amount of television shows and movies on DVD, and I almost always make time to listen to the commentary tracks. The one conversation that I’m tired of listening to is the one that seems to pop up in every commentary track ever recorded. Invariably, somebody on the commentary track wants to talk about a plot point that will be revealed either later in the movie or later in the episode, but they voice their hesitation since they don’t want to spoil the surprise for the viewer. Eventually, somebody else in the recording booth asks, “Who buys a DVD and goes straight to the commentary track without watching the original content?” Then the commentators have a good laugh over this nugget of insight and carry on as though they were the first people to ever have this conversation. There goes another two minutes of wasted commentary time. That’s two minutes’ worth of lost revelations.

  I realize that DVD commentary tracks are inherently a waste of time, but the least that these Hollywood professionals can do is have the courtesy to get a freaking clue about their own industry before they waste my time with this moronic running gag in their commentary tracks.

  


• Birds that swoop low to the ground when they’re flying across a street. Fuck birds. They can fly while the rest of us can’t, and yet they always swoop down into harm’s way in front of my moving car when they want to cross a street. I’ve nearly crashed into a couple of them in my time. Look, birds: the whole point of flying is being able to crap on us land dwellers’ heads all the while you stay out of our reach. If you birds are going to squander your ability with these daredevil antics, then you deserve whatever misfortune becomes of you when you’re not looking.

On this Thanksgiving Day of 2008, I give thanks for all of these petty grievances. They keep me irritated, they keep me human, and counter-intuitively, they probably keep me sane. Seriously though, fuck birds.

Posted by KZ on 11/27/08

“One day, when I was quite young,” my friend Wendy once wrote, “I saw a graffittied stop sign saying, ‘stop thewar,’ and I spent two days trying to figure out what thew ar was.”

Wendy’s recollection has always reminded me of a story of my own. One day at the age of thirteen, I was waiting in line for a ride at an amusement park. I noticed that somebody had carved onto a wooden post the words, “Jesus is Bord!” I had no idea what that meant, and I kept wondering what this person was trying to say. Maybe it was something as profound and as bleak as, “Jesus has lost all interest in our silly human games.” Or perhaps it was more of a blasphemous non sequitur like, “I am Jesus, and I am sick of waiting in this long line.” It wasn’t until three months later that I realized that the most likely story pointed to two authors: one to write the original message of “Jesus is Lord,” and a second one to carve a capital B out of the letter L. The world seems far more mundane once you take the mystery out of graffiti in public places.

It’s the excitement of the mystery, anonymity, and raw emotion behind graffiti that makes it so intriguing. I have never felt passionately enough to deface a public surface with a drawing or an earnest opinion, but I often wonder what goes through the minds of those people who do. Surely they understand that you can’t change the world by writing on a wall, don’t they? Perhaps they do understand that, but sometimes the most important thing is merely knowing that somebody somewhere can hear you. That’s almost admirable in an idealistic, sentimentally quixotic sort of way. Graffiti is vandalism, and I sure as hell don’t want anybody spraying up my house or my fences, but there’s something so primal and so urgent about it that I just can’t deny the inexorable humanity of it all. Sometimes the desire to be heard outweighs common sense and common courtesy. Sometimes graffiti is fucking cool.

Amongst rapper Mos Def’s many memorable rhymes, an excerpt from his song, Speed Law, has always stuck with me:

Get your power, your masks and capes snatched
Brooklyn take what you can’t take back
I know a lot of cats hate that
All I can say black
There’s a city full of walls you can post complaints at

Perhaps it’s silly of me to romanticize the vandalism of public and private property. Graffiti, after all, is obnoxious. It’s selfish and unsightly and invariably offensive to somebody. It’s the human equivalent of urinating on a tree to mark your presence. Although there is a growing movement of legitimate graffiti artists who have turned the medium into a viable art form, and although some disenfranchised idealists have written some powerful things on public walls over the years, the vast majority of the world’s graffiti amounts to hateful smut or hackneyed catch phrases. I guess as in all things in life, our only recourse is to tolerate the bad along with what little good there is to find.

Like it or not, the desire to be heard is a universal human constant — a necessity like laughter, friendship, water, and air. It is a deeply ingrained need that both inspires and taints the human heart. When Simon & Garfunkel sang about the words of the prophets written on the subway walls, they were tapping into the human desire to be heard in a paradoxical world where people struggle to communicate, all the while the technology enabling mass communication steadily improves. We have our blogs and our special interest forums and our Facebook accounts, but there’s no substituting a blank wall facing a busy street. We pee wherever the hell we want to pee because we are human beings, goddamn it, and we have a right to be heard. Just stay the fuck off my lawn and write on my neighbors’ walls, okay, humanity?

Posted by KZ on 11/19/08

The surest way to attract derision on the internet is to express a strong opinion about politics. I’ve kept this blog fairly apolitical for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I just don’t feel like pissing off my friends and picking fights with strangers. To fully understand what I mean, I invite you to visit YouTube and do a word search on either “Obama”, “McCain”, “Biden” or “Palin” and browse all of the toxic, hateful user comments on the video of your choice. With that caveat out of the way, I couldn’t let this day go by without saying something about the election.

When the race finally narrowed down to Barack Obama and John McCain, I was genuinely excited at the prospect of having a choice between two candidates whom I actually liked in nearly equal measure. There was plenty to like about both of these men, and I would have been proud to call either of them my president. To be frank, though, I was rooting for Obama all along — especially after the train wreck of a campaign that McCain was running in the final four months of the election season. The inclusion of Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, for example, was a deal breaker all on its own for me.

But that’s all beside the fact now, because Barack Obama is our new president. The national atmosphere is buzzing with expectation and renewed hope. For the first time in years, I am inspired by my country’s elected leadership. I’m excited by the prospect of a new American president who promises change — who promises to steer our country in a different direction after eight sloppy years of stewardship by George W. Bush. I only hope now that our man Obama can live up to the towering hype. There’s plenty of work to do, and plenty of chances to prove the skeptics right. Congratulations, President Obama. For everybody’s sake, I wish you well.

Posted by KZ on 11/04/08