The Shop On The Corner

Before our enlightened liberal condition of buying our cannabis at the modern corner apothecary completely fogs over the memories of the soul-crushing dark ages – “The Time Before,” as our children will refer to it – I thought it important to take a moment for the glorification of that stalwart bastion of pre-reform convenient drug distribution: the bodega.

The public acceptance of cannabis as common, excellent for mild pain relief and general relaxation, and in no way associated with demonic conspiracy will drive a constantly regenerating stream of brisk new business to the dispensaries. These dispensaries, provided we can sort out what boils down to zoning and finance details, will soon be as plentiful and irritating as Starbucks and catering to the same kinds of crowds. Nothing is the same kind of satisfying as watching a hippie stereotype change into a capitalist stereotype overnight. Phillip Morris is, at this moment, poised and ready to dominate the legal cannabis market with their monolithic agricultural and distribution network, and that's the pot the trendy kids and the newcomers will be buying at the chain corner shops. This slightly bothers me, in an inconsequential though chronic way, as I think teenagers are missing out on a rite of passage by buying their first bag off Camel's narcotics rack. Until very recently, the only two options for someone like me to purchase pot have been the friendly neighborhood dealer or the bodega, the latter of which I will now describe for those who haven't had the pleasure.

And it was a pleasure, chum.

Bodegas have existed in one form or another in every successful civilization. They are a staple of commerce, filling a need created by the population shift from dispersed agrarian to concentrated industrial. The customer base is the blue-collar community, with the errant white-collar cat slumming it, and the student/pensioner shopper who buys only enough white bread and Pop-Tarts to live on for 24-hour periods. Bigger than the walking vendor's fruit cart, smaller than the proper grocery store, the bodega progressed from the miniscule corner shop to an international force. Asian cities, particularly Taiwan, have landscapes virtually dominated by shops like 7-11.

It looks like Michael Bay directed a remake of Blade Runner.

My bodega was downtown, in a stupidly scenic location surrounded by lush trees and century-old buildings. Just walking among the stunning architecture Oregon produced during the years its fledgling towns became proper cities is sometimes breathtaking, and having beautiful structures mindfully nestled into the pre-existing majesty of the area as a backdrop for a minor drug transaction is certainly one of the most pleasant ways I expect one can engage in such behavior. The bodega was on 13^th street, one of the main east/west drags, a one-way shot that was part of my late night aimless driving loop. It sat in the University's shadow and took up a third of the block, sitting wall-to-wall with one of the finest bars ever to exist on its eastern side, a bar which supplied the bodega with a stream of cigarette and hot case food purchases until three AM every morning. The buildings were recognized as historic places, but out of longevity alone instead of being any kind of thematic examples. They looked like art deco buildings from 1920's Los Angeles, but in the proper light they could have been the city hall/bank/post office in a barely-developed Tombstone. They were visually striking as specific in a non-specific way, timeless and geographically indeterminate. Walls textured like an adobe fort, with window and door frames simply designed but more than functional. In three small alcoves high on the wall and facing the street, virtually unnoticed unless pointed out, were small Roman statuaries of women in different poses.

Two sets of double doors, the majority of which were glass framed very thinly by wood painted a dark forest green holding brass fixtures burnished by a hundred thousand hands, opened onto 13^th street. One set of these doors was recessed in each end of the building, directly next to the cashier and as far opposite as possible. The owners had lined the walls with drink coolers, but had made the rather poor decision to stock the beer and Boone's Farm in the coolers closest to the second set of doors, and therefore farthest from the cashier's control. This product location decision had the foreseeably adverse effect of inspiring alcoholic thieves to get their cardiovascular exercise for the day by entering through the cashier's door, picking up a handful of items as they walked the aisles to lower suspicions, then dropping everything to run out the second set of doors with a case or armful of forties. I eventually learned to spot the differences between the angle someone holds their head at when they're genuinely figuring out what they want versus the angle used when they're waiting for you to look away. In response to this unremitting rise in skullduggery, the owners applied more of their wisdom and began locking the second set of doors at six every night, which did little to stem overall theft but made the beer coolers seem like less of a problem.

Nahasapeemapetilans they were not.

Since I never personally had the occasion to require the bodega's services when I was on foot, I would drive past the double doors, turning right off thirteenth and right again into the kind of back alley one would find severed ears in. I would then ease the delicately hideous curves of my Ford Maverick (and later that goddamn Jetta) into one of the city parking spaces that were painted by people who had either never seen a picture of an American car or generally despised the concept of internal combustion, and walk past the bar's rear smoking porch to enter the bodega through the back door.

It was unmarked, save for a tattered and sun-bleached “Employees Only” sign held on by what used to be two screws. Slightly larger than one would expect for a service entrance, it was set underneath a Reagan-era air conditioning unit shoved into a rough-cut hole in the gnarled exterior wall. This Cooling Unit of Damocles was supported in afterthought by good intentions and what appeared to be two repurposed metal plant hangers secured with an admirable amount of flashing tape. Enveloping Schrodinger’s Alcove was what could be legally referred to as a shelter, an eight-foot structure supported with pressure-treated 4x4's and wrapped in trailer park-style plastic corrugated roofing on all sides. The plastic was probably blue to begin with, but time makes fools of us all, and the corrugate had become a brittle thing with a color halfway between beige and sad. It was in that odd space among empty banana boxes and spent fountain soda syrup bags that my connection and I would stand together, bathed in that strangely-tinted light, and share a smoke when I was the only business. During one of our safety meetings on a crushing summer afternoon in August our conversation was abruptly silenced by a stunning flash. The bolt, though I never saw it directly, licked close enough to us for me to listen to the innocent and unsuspecting air become scorched and make a sound not unlike a pit viper maliciously ripping a piece of paper. Before I had time to recognize that high wail keening in my skull, the thunder upended over us and rolled through town like someone owed it money. Seconds later hail began falling, timidly at first and then with vigor, and it did nothing to cool the air. Blocks over we heard the first car alarm start, and more joined, all backed by the cruel percussion of the hail. We stood and took all that beauty in, him and I.

Imagine this, but made of electricity and fire.

But I digress. The transaction was conducted thusly: By the time I had crossed the threshold my end of the deal was already folded and concealed in the palm of my hand, as illustrated best by Mr. Steve Martin in the Academy Award-adjacent movie My Blue Heaven. Walking straight would have exited me out one of the front double-doors, the cashier's counter was at one o'clock, and next to my end of that counter was a small card table which always supported an open soda and a book. I would go to the table and grab the book, dropping the money next to where it had been and commenting on the author or some nonsense, then walk away to grab something from the cooler that would punish my treacherous kidneys. My connection would know how much I wanted from the amount I had left, and the money would vanish. I would bring my purchases up, and when he reached under the counter for a paper bag, that bag would come up with my supplies already ensconced within. I would exit through the same back door, and once in the car would immediately open the bag to fill the air with the rich and comforting smell of a relaxing afternoon. No tax stamp, no one else's business, no more complicated than buying a sandwich. Sounds weird as hell, I know, but that's how we did things in The Time Before.

You kids come see Grandpa any time, now.

Book Review: Singh Slips Simpsons Secrets Subjectively

 

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Bloomsbury USA, 235pp, ISBN 978-1-62040-277-1

If your sphere of experience overlaps at all with mine, then in 1990 you had run through the entirety of Monty Python's catalog and were in need of something freshly bizarre to aid in informing your young comedic sensibilities. The Simpsons filled that spot for me and the hooligans I ran with, all of us noticing as we got older that the episodes had line deliveries followed by a silent pause which our comedic timing told us shouldn't be there. If we weren't laughing, there couldn't have been a joke and therefore shouldn't be a moment for people to laugh at that joke.

The understanding of hidden humor, coupled with the information that visual jokes had been virtually hidden by nature of being onscreen for only a second, caused me to learn to pause the VCR with a proficiency I haven't been able to develop in anything else since and seek out the references I couldn't recognize. This resulted in uncounted jokes with varying degrees of required maturity on billboards and buses, signs posted inside the nuclear plant or Moe's Bar, shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from films I had never heard of, a deeper understanding of Buddhist philosophy as it relates to miniature golf tournaments, and why proper punctuation is vital in all activities.

While we're here, Phil Hartman was the greatest

 

To this day my favorite is still the sixth Treehouse of Horror episode story “Homer Cubed,” which contains both Professor Frink's go-anywhere blackboard explanation of Homer's “Frinkahedron” projection into the third dimension and a number of concise but fascinating mathematical ideas that peacefully floated (or, if you prefer, peacefully failed to fall) around the three-dimensional space Homer found himself in. One of these jewels of human achievement went on to become my favorite equation of all time for what it represented to me philosophically. Called Euler's Identity and written e^(i)(pi) + 1 = 0 or sometimes e^(i)(pi) = -1, this equation contains what my statistics professor called the only five numbers that matter: e (natural log base), i (the imaginary square root of -1), pi (circumference over diameter for a circle, the same for a dime or the earth), 1 (the loneliest number that you'll ever do), and 0 (concretely understood first in India, although “zero” comes from the Arabic word for something empty). I encourage you to seek out more information on this identity, as it really is quite remarkable, but if you aren't the kind of person who doggedly hangs on to new ideas until you at least feel you're no longer completely uneducated on the subject there is literally nothing I can write that will compel you to go learn about an equation you've already forgotten. This schism in interests brings me to Simon Singh's recent book, called The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.

Knowledge makes you strong, kids

 

Singh's work is meant to be an encompassing insight on the math tidbits that the writers of the show snuck into episodes of both The Simpsons and Futurama to entertain either themselves or the fraction of people who would both want to replay a recorded cartoon and be able to get the joke, and I certainly can't think of anything he's omitted. The book also seeks to provide as much background as possible for understanding the gags, being mindful of the dangers inherent in short-term math overdose, and in this I think it succeeds as well. The book fails, however, in two tangentially related ways that I shall explain.

I related my personal introduction to the freeze frame gags to highlight that only a certain slice of people have that kind of reaction to hidden humor, and I think it's safe to argue that, like I did, once the tap gets turned on you never think to turn it off. It's not just the gag you saw last night, it's the understanding that other jokes in other episodes that you didn't even realize you were missing are waiting to be discovered, and some kid down the block has those on tape and you can go find them yourself. It is a self-perpetuating hunger, and one which is easily fed once the internet connected all of us in our search, allowing for the compilation of a master list I still have in a drawer somewhere, long since outdated, weathered dot-matrix printer guide strips still tenuously connected by stubborn twentieth century willpower. We knew all the jokes, even the ones we didn't yet understand, because to begin the search meant taking it as far as we could. As a result, Singh's book has the initial appeal of being precisely focused at my sensibilities, but there came a remarkable letdown once I realized I was having a part of my youth recycled and retold to me with all the emphasis on math and none on the Starlight Vocal Band. It was meant to excite me and convince me to part with money, but each chapter was another step into remembering the first time I heard the story on the episode's commentary track. Further, if you're already a lover of higher level math presumably none of the principles Singh talks about will be anything new, but if you don't understand them his explanations will not easily educate you. This book isn't targeted at a nationwide audience, it's targeted at the Venn overlap of Simpsons devotees and lovers of mathematics, and in my case it failed on both fronts.

Never forget.

 

My second criticism is the author's personal voice. I am unfair in this regard perhaps, because this isn't a textbook, but Singh provided several examples of the high regard mathematicians in general hold themselves over other disciplines, which I find childish and distasteful from any professional. Also briefly included were some of the author's thoughts on homeopathy and alternative medicines, which were not only unwelcome but well outside the author's scope and the book's purpose. I say again that this second criticism may be discarded without a second thought, because Singh is well-educated and many people had very nice things to say about this book, but passing snide remarks on disciplines I hold quite dear and personal interjections of ill-founded ideas on medicine apropos of nothing were so disjointed and persistently distracting as to make this book interminable for me.