Clip shows were one of the most annoying things about watching television in the 1980s. You rarely see them anymore since people have figured out they were just a lazy ploy to beef up the number of shows to hit the syndication threshold.
But they were also a way for people to easily meet an arbitrary number of episodes while dealing with competing pressures. They interspersed highlights from old episodes with a few never-before scenes to try and keep the viewer from feeling totally cheated.
I prepared several columns before the recent birth of my first child. This week’s column follows the clip-show tradition to buy me another week while seeming like I’m offering fresh content.
Here are some short paragraphs and one-liners that I cut from past columns:
On belonging:
I belong to my local supermarket rewards club, just to get the gas discount, but not to my pharmacy or any other store. I still put in my dead mother’s phone number and it always works. Her rewards card memberships are a big part of her legacy.
You can belong to a gym, a museum, or a club, but not to a treadmill, a painting, or a game. Some sort of permanence is required.
On craft beer snobs:
White men have taken the emotional repression of our religious ancestry and transferred them into a secular direction. Castrating ourselves of joy at the altar of barley and hops.
I’ve seen this pattern before. People segregating their M&Ms by color as if they were somehow differently flavored. These aren’t Skittles, people, suck it up and eat one. Food coloring is the only difference, anything else is psychological.
On hand-washing of dishes vs using a dishwasher:
It can be hard to go back to hand washing once you’ve adopted the automated lifestyle. Jenny’s resistance almost kept me from renting a house for two years. When relocating to Connecticut from Texas, Jenny preferred a two-bedroom condo over an entire house because of the presence of a dishwasher.
In her opinion, the benefits of privacy, a front yard, a driveway, garage, back yard, bushes, grass, and trees all failed to make up for the difference.
I had to promise to do all of the dishes for the entire time we lived there. Halfway through hosting our first family backyard barbecue, she admitted I had been right all along. When it came time to do the dishes, I insisted that she had actually been the one who was right.
She was just feeling gracious because that backyard barbecue is when I asked her to be my wife.
On when to put up the Christmas tree:
There are many petty arguments about when Christmas season begins, but I side with the vast majority of Americans who say it starts when Santa closes out the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Black Friday shoppers certainly agree.
Christmas season starting with the Macy’s parade Santa is as important a part of American tradition as the Royal Rumble starting off the road to Wrestlemania. It’s simply how things are done.
Our tree goes up no sooner than the day after Thanksgiving. Jenny did a good job arguing her counterpoint this year to try and get our Christmas tree up as early as July, but did not prevail. She tried to put her foot down on the matter, but it really hurt her case that the foot she put down was still wearing a sandal.
On my father’s garbage song:
My father used to have a song called “The Sunday Night Throwout.” It was a beautiful arrangement encapsulating the toil and strife of a workman’s song along with an emotional lament on the excesses of modern consumer culture. Or, a passive gripe about ungrateful kids letting the cantaloupe spoil. Either way, it was a weekly staple.
On fearing change:
There are many reasons that change can be scary. It’s particularly upsetting when our expectations don’t match reality. Like someone who constantly watches the Food Network and finally visits the studios only to discover that the staff spends most of their time doing dishes and that the whole place smells like onions.
On the fact that writing this column is ridiculous:
Almost everything we do is ridiculous. I’ve long believed this from my high school days making a sketch show on public access television to now, sitting alone pushing buttons a keyboard that will magically transmit my words straight to your eyes – anywhere in the world.
There are so many trivial and meaningless things you do with your time – thank you for spending a few minutes of that time with me.
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