2B — Thursday, November 8, 2018
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Stories of life: Slices in the cake of human experience
Consider something as short
as a single tweet: 280 characters
to express your most surreal,
plain, intrusive or wholesome
thoughts. Now take the 137,374
defined Unicode characters
and
permutate
them
with
Twitter’s strict character limit
and you get … well, a seemingly
infinite number of possible
tweets. That number would
approach
the
point
where
conventional
mathematical
language becomes pointless
and “bazillion” is the best
delineation. But the thing is,
it is a number. It has some end.
Now, of course someone
isn’t going to tweet out all
the combinations that could
be made with the spiderweb
emoji, an inverted question
mark and the letter Æ, so the
number of possible tweets can
be cut by, let’s say, half. Still,
that leaves a lot of room to
stretch one’s creative legs. But,
has all that creative potential
been exploited? Is Twitter
approaching a critical mass at
which every good tweet will
start to be recycled? Are none
of us original?
This
thought
didn’t
cripple my comedy until I
stumbled into an inane joke
while texting a friend: If
David Attenborough made a
documentary about Grindr, it
would be called Planet Girth.
Yet searching “planet girth”
on Twitter before I was about
to post my own thoughts
yielded
dozens
of
similar
search results, all of which
arrived at the same conclusion
assumingly
independent
of
each other.
Maybe the question is not
if
Twitter
had
exhausted
all possible combinations of
usable characters and words
and if every imaginable tweet
will soon
be sent, but
we should instead consider
if we have exhausted every
idiosyncratic
thought.
In
a song that served as the
inspiration
for
the
above
title, Brandon Flowers of The
Killers sings “Has every ship
gone sailing? Has every heart
gone blue?”
All of these questions racing
through my mind made me
wonder if the common bonds
connecting our individual lives
and experiences are stronger
and more similar than we
think. So, I set out to compile
this collection of micro-stories
from the happenings of my
own life and the accounts of
others, blurring actuality and
speculation. Unless specifically
identified for an interview,
no person mentioned (and
their
respective
pronouns)
necessarily has a real life
analogue. Call it true flash
fiction, if you will.
With all that in order, let
us embark on this shared
journey
through
memories,
through Ann Arbor cultural
institutions, through artistic
escapades, through life.
ROBERT MANSUETTI
Daily Arts Writer
B-SIDE LEAD
Has it all been written?
CARTER FOX / DAILY
The smell of freshly made
waffle cones was a heavenly
distraction
waiting
on
the
long, low bench. While divine,
Blank Slate Creamery doesn’t
particularly
remind
me
of
the simple shops I patronized
throughout
my
childhood
and the gallons of ice cream
consumed from them. It’s a
bit too neat, too bohemian
to
conjure
images
of
the
hometown
lunch
counters
where I got my fix, those
that doubled as ice cream
parlors
after
school
ended
and entertained with simple
treats and pinball machines.
Yet to some seven-year-old in
2018, this is their childhood,
what they’ll yearn for when
liquid nitrogen balls and rolled
ice cream become the new
standard.
Lana Hinojosa, an employee
at Blank Slate and recent
University graduate, seemed
to share a similar nostalgia,
reminiscing
of
“being
carefree,” “ignorance is bliss,”
“no problems” when I asked her
what she missed about being
a kid. Oh, and “lots of PBJs.”
Like most of us, her palate
has refined over the years,
now preferring the seasonal
gingerbread flavor exclusive to
Blank Slate over the “artificial
ones like Superman and Bubble
Gum.” While Hinojosa has
never been fond of anything
strawberry-flavored, we both
shared that same youthful love
of those visually appealing
and disgusting flavors, unholy
mixes of red, yellow and blue
we ordered purely because it
looked cool.
Wrapping up our very brief
chat, I asked her to share her
saddest story involving ice
cream. “When I was little,
I stepped on the (block ‘M’
in the middle of the Diag)
and dropped my ice cream
immediately after,” Hinojosa
remembered. “It actually is bad
luck!” On the way out, I didn’t
see any toddler spoil the floor
with their heaping cones and
wondered if it was due to their
good luck or mine.
Bad luck
A24
The first thing they really did
together was see “Lady Bird,” a
gamble on her part because she
knew not of his tastes, only of his
girlfriend. Still, he accepted; they
entered as friends, they laughed
as friends, they cried as friends,
they got ice cream afterward
as friends. He says it’s the most
he’s ever related to a female
protagonist in his moviegoing
life, while she responds saying
the movie might as well be her
life.
“I didn’t know you lived in
California,” he interjects.
“I’ve moved around, from
East to West and everywhere in
between, so to make it easy I just
say I’m from Grand Rapids,” she
states plainly, reciting a speech
she has said a thousand times
before.
“That’s
really
awesome,”
he responds, a hint of genuine
interest emerges. “I’ve moved
around a lot because of my dad’s
job. What about you?”
“Oh, you know, kind of the
same, really. That, and family.”
She was hiding something,
something she had left behind in
that wretched state, something
he would come to learn because
he stuck around.
The two also slowly learned
the other didn’t really want to
be alive, and while they weren’t
exactly the best for each other,
they did help, and both lived to
tell the tale of the other to exes of
future past.
Years later, she finds herself in
the big city, attending a special
screening of the classic “Lady
Bird” in a small theater. The
audience made up of mostly
first-time viewers, they laugh at
all the wrong moments and she
feels the greater need to conceal
her crying. She can’t believe
they laugh when it’s Lady Bird’s
birthday and her dad presents
her with a meager cupcake. She
thinks of her dad and the special
cupcakes he made for her on
her special day, both of which
have become one with the hard
California ground.
No one wants to die in California
The inside-out pajamas did
the trick. The neighborhood-
wide flushing of ice cubes
down
the
toilet
was
so
ridiculous it actually worked:
These Southern rugrats finally
saw snow for the first time in
their short lives. Seeing their
district listed on the wobbly
image of CRT television was a
sight they wouldn’t see again
for some time after, so they
cherished it as best they could.
When the snowmen finally
melted,
they
all
returned
home for mom’s special cup
of Swiss Miss and retreated
to their rooms to spend more
time with the Littlest Pet Shop
toys or the copy of “Super
Mario Galaxy” they got for
Christmas a few odd weeks
ago.
The
kids
in
the
North
trudged
onto
the
bus,
stomping the snow off their
boots before they got to their
seats and turning the walkway
into a slippery, slushy slice of
rubber. It had snowed for the
past two weeks, and here they
were braving the arctic tundra
to get to school. Half-assing
their homework, they were not
placated when they saw news
reports from the kitchen table
of entire states shutting down
thanks to a half-inch of snow.
They went to bed peeved, and
while they slept, the buses
could not start. Their mothers
could let them sleep in the
next morning.
Nowadays, the internet is
the school’s last line of defense
and homework still comes, and
that one winter snow day they
used to look forward to the
whole year isn’t fun anymore.
One day a year
“I think the world was cooler
without
cellphones,”
Curtis
Sullivan,
co-owner
and
self-
proclaimed “counter watcher” at
Main Street’s Vault of Midnight,
said, laughing as he added, “That’s
an old man thing to say.” The Vault
is a carefully curated love letter to
the times when “you didn’t have
your face buried in (that) stupid
thing,” Sullivan explained. When
“you would, like, ride bikes and
shit.”
The walls and shelves of the
Vault are lined with books and
baubles we would excitedly stuff
into our backpacks before biking
down to our best friend’s house to
show it off. There’s comics about
Conan the Barbarian, the Teen
Titans and Sonic the Hedgehog, the
favorite heroes of a young Sullivan,
surrounded by “The Art of Wes
Anderson” hardbacks, Gudetama
the Lazy Egg figures and puzzles
showing scenes from “Super Mario
Odyssey.”
It’s all the stuff for which we
would beg our parents and hold
out until our birthdays, a trip
down memory lane for dorks of all
kinds, even self-proclaimed super-
dorks like Sullivan who “did model
rockets, flew kites (and) had model
railroads.”
With some intense trumpet
instrumental
playing
in
the
background,
Sullivan
casually
drops the fact that he worships
Satan only 10 seconds into our
conversation, and I’m relieved
he’s just as weird as me, two nerds
separated by scant decades.
“Just kidding,” he clarified.
“That’s what people used to say
back in 1982 if you played Dungeons
and Dragons.”
I think of how nervous I was
when my grade school friend’s
Catholic mom took his Pokémon
cards away from him, fearing my
mom would do the same, sliding
my Tyranitar collector’s tin under
my bed as soon as I got home.
Heresy, in glorious Technicolor
FILE PHOTO / DAILY
Up until that point, he
was stranded exactly twice
in his life. Both were caused
by a failure to understand
but solved by the ability to
communicate.
Had
he
not
had the cellphone his dad
somehow got for 25 bucks
at the local hardware store,
he probably would’ve had to
resort to busking, drifting
throughout life relying on
his only bankable skill —
his forced knowledge of the
saxophone.
Luckily, each time he was
able to call one of his parents
and dictate where he thought
he was in that foreign country.
It took always took a bit, but he
was located nonetheless, both
times the parent accompanied
by a family friend. Strange,
looking back on it.
Now he wishes his parents,
or even their friends, were on
speed dial, but it would take
them hours to drive to this
faraway state. The irony: He
has the world at his fingertips,
but to try and touch it would cut
those selfsame fingertips since
he broke it in the commotion
of his first college party. In the
short time it took to find the
smartphone in the bedlam of
spastic, disparate feet, those
few others seen arriving with
him were nowhere to be seen.
Hopefully he could tipsily
remember the confusing way
back to his dorm. Hopefully
he’d make it back, stretcher
or not. Hopefully his parents
would never ask what the
police reported he was in
possession of.
112
The first thing
they really did
together was see
“Lady Bird,” a
gamble on her
part because she
knew not of his
tastes, only of his
girlfriend
The Vault is a
carefully curated
love letter to the
times when ‘you
didn’t have your
face buried in
(that) stupid thing’
FILE PHOTO / DAILY