daily prompt

Daily Prompt: Shampoo You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 4 asks the immortal question, “Bacon and chocolate, caramel and cheddar. Is there an unorthodox food pairing you really enjoy? Share with us the weirdest combo you’re willing to admit that you like—and how you discovered it.”
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No brand names will be harmed in the telling of this anecdote.

Many beauty care products have nutrients among their many ingredients, most of which are rendered as unpronounceable chemical compound-names or names of compounds. Not all. There is oatmeal soap, of course, which does a great job moisturizing dry skin and scrubbing off dead skin and is made of oatmeal and various butters and smells like breakfast. I am not going to pour some maple syrup on a bar and “start my day off right” with it, however.

One evening in graduate school, my housemates and I set down a challenge: Find the two products in our house with the least in common but the most in common in their ingredient lists. (How we had time for this and school, I do not know.) The only stipulation was that something like a Snickers bar was ruled out, for reasons of obviousness. The Snickers bar and many similar candy bars are their own examples of this challenge.

I figured we would discover the hidden connections between Ramen noodles and actual food, thus justifying our typical grad school meal plan, or between frozen pizza and a livable diet, but we did not. We could not. The idea that he will someday justify his junk food consumption is the obsession of every grad school student (pg. 30, “More About Junk Food”).

One ingredient list in particular triggered my memory. Looking at a toaster pastry box, I knew I was reading something that I saw every day, but I could not place it. Something about the ingredients for the filling; it was like re-reading a poem I had memorized once but forgotten after taking the final exam.

I retired to the bathroom, where good thinking happens, and there it was: a bottle of shampoo. I had the winner. The filling of a generic toaster pastry—generic, not branded—either had or has (I have not checked until writing this today) a lot in common with generic shampoo. Water. Of course. Certain specific dyes? Absolutely. And the specificity of the dyes creeped me out, well, to this day, actually. Blue number whatever and green letter that. The exact ones. (The fantasy that I had been eating a single strawberry carefully spread with a new and clean knife for each toaster pastry and lovingly placed inside each toaster pastry by a kindly toaster pastry maker with medical benefits and a good retirement plan persisted till very late in life. My naivete is something I fight to forget so I can fight for various causes and then I make sure I re-become naive so I can eat.) Some phosphates. Of course.

My housemates agreed: Either we had been eating shampoo or washing our hair with breakfast goodness. The toaster pastries remained untouched in our kitchen until after we moved out. Once, as a joke, a familiar foil wrapper was placed in the shower, next to the soap.

I am looking at websites of various products while writing this and not finding as much in common on the lists as I did that day, which leads me to three thoughts: One, that the ingredients have been changed; two, that the names have been changed; three, that maybe generic products list their ingredients very bluntly.

I have not had a toaster pastry since the early ’90s because—rightly or wrongly, and mostly wrongly, I naively admit—I believed I was eating a dry cookie with holes in it and shampoo filling.

An Artist of the Surprise Gesture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 2 requests that one’s post includes three random items. “Write a post about any topic you want, in whatever form or genre, but make sure it features a slice of cake, a pair of flip-flops, and someone old and wise.” I chose to write flash fiction.
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“I don’t know why she makes such a production out of everything,” Aunt Helen said to no one and everyone, shaking her head.

“She likes making the effort,” I offered. She looked directly at me with that. When I continued, “Maybe the reward is in the doing,” it ended as a drifting-off question.

“Not only am I going to look at you like I think you have three heads, I think you have three heads,” the aunt said. She looked out the window. Victoria was digging for something in her car, so far in that her feet were off the ground. “If it’s that far in, shouldn’t she just go around to the other side?”

“I think she is grabbing it by the base.” I hadn’t even walked over to the window to see for myself. It was a Christmas tree, fake, but already decorated with ornaments, and thus unstable no matter which method Victoria employed to retrieve it from the car. She had had her son hold it steady from his position in his car seat.

“Well, if you know what she’s doing, why didn’t you know I just wanted to cook dinner for myself, watch my stories, and go to bed?” Helen’s jowls were in constant motion as she clenched and unclenched her jaw, pursed her lips and forced her mouth to relax. We were bringing her some Christmas on her 89th birthday, and the visit was unannounced. It was unannounced because it was unplanned. Not an hour before, Victoria had remembered that she had a tree “somewhere” and that her aunt did not have a tree anywhere. Thirty minutes later, my legs were the ones off the ground as I grabbed it by its base and attempted to gently remove the tree from its storage box on a forgotten high shelf in the basement. It was still decorated from a Christmas in the ’70s. Fifteen minutes before that, I was failing to find it in a shed behind her house. I awoke that morning to her telling me her plan as if it had already happened, as if it was an anecdote.

Choosing to decide that I indeed hoped that this was an anecdote about something that had already happened—me searching for her childhood Christmas tree and us driving to Aunt Helen’s—I asked “This (story) is from last year?” If the answer was yes, we were then going to make our plans for the rest of the day, plans that I would have been happy to learn included shopping for next summer’s flip-flops or cleaning the house. Anything but one of Victoria’s adventures. Of course, deep down I actually wanted to be a part of one of her adventures, and I knew how to play very well my role of “grudging friend who gets won over.”

Whatever planning that might have been required for the day with her aunt had happened in Victoria’s head during the night before, without her consulting anyone who might be capable of implementing her plan to show love: neither me, the “muscle,” nor Aunt Helen, the recipient. It was up to us to live up to her scheme, a desire to do something so spontaneous and loving and generous that everyone involved would enjoy the spontaneity, embrace the love, and participate in the generosity. But if we failed to live up to the plan in her head, well, life is a challenge with an artist of the surprise gesture.

But something was different about this adventure: Helen was having none of it. “I didn’t ask for a tree! You should have just brought me some cake.” Victoria moved the tree to her kitchen, and while she was out of earshot, Helen whispered something I can not forget: “I don’t know why she tries so hard. It would be easier if she just said ‘I love you.'”

Daily Prompt: Seven Sins Are Enough, But Here Are Two More

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 1 asks, “Remember the seven cardinal sins? You’re given the serious task of adding a new one to the list—another trait or behavior you find particularly unacceptable, for whatever reason. What’s sin #8 for you? Why?”

“Serious task”? Truly?

The seven cardinal sins, AKA “The Seven Deadly Sins” on most Most Wanted posters, are Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth. “Poor Sloth,” a friend once said, “always trailing behind and coming in last on the list. If only he could speed up. There is nothing Sloth can’t do once he sets his mind to it.”

Any personal pique I may have against some irritating something I encounter during the day might find itself labeled as my eighth deadly sin—for that day, anyway—but me naming any personal irritation or pique as a Deadly Sin falls under Pride, doesn’t it?

Intellectual sloppiness, of the type that the internet does not encourage but certainly, in its eternally passive and continuous availability, allows to happen, that’s my biggest pet peeve. So is rudeness hidden behind the mask of anonymity. Comments on, well, any web site that allows comments (except this one, of course. Comments on WordPress sites generally and here on The Gad About Town specifically appear to be uniformly thoughtful and thought-provoking and supportive. It is why this blog is located in WordPress Land. Now of course someone is going to comment below with something along the lines of “Baba Booey!”) are almost always teeth-grindingly awful. I want to tape up the lower half of my computer screen, like my mom did with our television once: After that horrible day of 9/11, American news networks started scrolling news headlines at the bottom of our television screens—only breaking news headlines at first, because the news was coming in so quickly that the continuous scroll was required to get it all out, but then the scroll remained and they all have it all the time to this day, even some local news channels. My mother could not take it. It was too much. Shortly after 9/11, I came home to a television set with packing tape covering the lower portion of the screen, so she no longer felt so overwhelmed and dizzy from the unneeded movement on screen and unnecessary barrage of “Breaking News.”

I need to provide myself with a similar service for the section of comments below videos on YouTube and other web sites. I want to throw a protective layer of packing tape between me and much of the world. And Twitter: Too often you are a part of the problem and not the solution, also. How much dumb can be packed into 140 characters? Sometimes I am happily surprised by things on Twitter, but never by YouTube comments. That world is just a waste land of empty anger, accusations of anger, claims of superior anger, and rudeness.

Is it a sinful-level Pride in me to detest the inane and vague? When one friend posts a disprovable “Internet rumor” online and I attempt to correct it, I almost always regret making the attempt. I insist on gentleness in this task and write something about how this claim is seen online very frequently and that the frequency led me to check some things out and that the claim is just not correct. I have seen people offer rude and not-very gentle “corrections” online, but those merely use another sin: Anger. But, inevitably, the accusation comes that I am full of myself and a question is asked about which Global Institute of Knowing Things Correctly appointed me Head Fact Knower and Associate Checker?

The only thing I know to an expert level is that I know I do not know much, and that I like to look things up. I even found that I was relying too frequently, with too casual an ease about it, on Snopes.com, the famous debunker website. A friend wrote me, “Who has ever Snopes’ed Snopes.com? I hear it’s just some guy without training or anything.” (I never asked what training would be required besides enjoying looking things up.) But the website in fact has Snopes’ed itself and it is pretty open about its writers’ expertise: About Snopes. Other websites have interviewed the founders. The lesson for me was to be more rigorous. And trust Snopes, as far as internet rumors go.

It is odd that people claim to take seriously the idea that they must question authority (we must, definitely we must, question all authority, including our own), especially intellectual authority, so they will defend sloppy assertions over the debunking of these assertions, almost as if they see the sloppy assertion as a child being bullied by the mean truth. (I am withholding concrete examples of sloppy assertions and their corrections, because I do not want to give them the air to breathe.)

Rudeness masked by anonymity, a proud anti-intellectual streak masked by a falsely humble belief that one is an independent thinker, these are the peeviest of my pet peeves. Are they deadly sins, though? Do they meet that standard? I am no expert, but having been a pretty good achiever in my life in the other seven sins, I now do not like it when I encounter any of them.