Stunning, how inept...

... I can be

Before I elaborate on that statement in, hopefully, efficient detail, I want to note that my previous three blog entries (variations on "In the time that we have left..."), may not have been a good idea. Or, at least, advanced an idea that needed extensive elaboration, which I was not at all prepared to develop. Another time, perhaps.

Moving on, then.

This is a story about how inept I can be. It begins around 8:03 some recent morning when Brendan, who was probably already out uberring, texted me. "Hey, did you ever happen to get a new city sticker for my car?"

I read his text about an hour later. Reading sent my stomach to roiling. In my Chicago experience, going on 15 years this century, renewing the city stickers on our cars is a reliably fraught undertaking.

After writing most of the 130 or so words immediately preceding, I took my first writing break. I know. I write all of 130 words and I am so exhausted I need a break? Yeah, well, diligence is not one of my major qualities. Regardless, after I took that break, I wrote the paragraphs indented below:

I need to run out to the porch to check the temperature on the grill because I am trying to slowly smoke a slab of back ribs. And, having performed that check, I extend my break to take a shot of tequila. A reward I promised myself if I so much as began this post about my day in pursuit of a renewed city sticker for our Honda Accord. The one that Brendan takes uberring.

Tequila shots are not, of course, my usual practice. I drink beer moderately and rarely touch hard liquor. But that day was special. It was 40 degrees out and I was trying to smoke a slab of ribs on my grill. Lots of people can do that, although the cold day will increase the challenge of maintaining the grill temperature in the range of 180 to 200 degrees. 

And it was also the day that I had the set of experiences that led me to decide to write a story about how inept I can be, an ineptness that had me rueing bad decisions and incompetence. Hence, in the moment, I soothed myself with a shot of tequila.

Break over, I returned to the writing task. The tequila shot was a big one in more ways than one. 

Oversize shot glass. A Mark Twain souvenir from Hannibal, Missouri. 'Never refuse to take a drink--under any circumstances," it says, quoting Twain. 

That's not my style. But right now, I wish it was. Not because my especially inept performance earlier that day made me wish I was drunk. After all, that experience of myself as less than competent is in no way unusual and, at this point in my life, it's not very distressing. Overtime, one tends to get over harsh feelings about oneself. But from time to time I do wonder if I might have tapped a little bit more genius if I had gotten to the bottom of more bottles in this life.

After absorbing Brendan's text and moving on from the sinking feeling, I dialed the city information line. A polite and helpful phone operator answered almost immediately, giving me a number for the city clerk's office where, the helpful phone operator assured me, still another helpful city staffer would certainly tell me how to go about replacing the city sticker that I apparently had previously purchased, and then lost, in some unremembered fashion, and was never gonna find.

Thirty-one minutes later, I finally came off hold to engage a voice. Thirty-one. Minutes. Later. WTF, you're probably saying to yourself, you stayed on hold for 31 minutes? Couldn't you think of a better way to go about doing what you needed to do?'

Well, no. I just let the time slip away. Though while on hold I did get through two pages of comics in the morning newspaper. Some number of other people (many? most? all?) wouldn't consider that a very productive use of my time, but I am generally not inclined to think about my time in such terms.

Anyhow... "I bought a new city sticker for my car about two months ago, but my son just told me that we still have the 2022 sticker on the windshield. I assume we lost the last one, so I need to know how to get a replacement."

"Oh," the helpful voice responded, "I'm going to give you the number of the office that can answer that question for you."

"Oy," I kvetched, "you can't tell me how to do it?" I almost added that I'd been on hold for thirty-one minutes, then refrained from saying so. Because, really, nobody who takes the calls of people who have been living on long holds is likely to be motivated by a desire to provide whatever it is that might be needed by the person coming off hold, especially if they had been holding on the wrong line.

"Sorry," she responded, "this number is for fines and late fees."

"Okay, I get it. Can you give me that number, again?"

And she did. And I called the number and talked to a woman who told me that I just needed to come downtown to city hall, go to the police desk near the entry, get a "miscellaneous police report" from them, take it to the clerk's office on the first floor, and pay $5 to replace the missing city sticker.

I was good with that. I could take the Green Line from the 31st Street/IIT station near my house and get downtown in, oh, say, 30 minutes or thereabouts. And, before I could even consider riding my bike to the clerk's office (which, as it turned out, would have been a much smarter decision), I realized that I could read on the train. This is generally a good thing because I tend to not put aside time to read at home.

Brendan had offered to stop uberring for a bit and give me a ride downtown. But I'm thinking that he needs the money he's working to earn--he's in law school and near-broke most of the time--and I make a habit of walking or taking public trans whenever I can, even when it comes at a significant cost in time.

I should add that much of my adult life has been shaped by another "behavioral inefficiency," the guilty wish to be the direct cause of as few environmental-havocing, fossil-fuel-consuming, climate-changing, class-gender-and-race-privileged deeds, woke or otherwise, as I can manage. (This statement should also be the departure point for a future post about the privilege I was born with, and have never been able to outrun, despite struggling often, but perhaps half-heartedly, to reject. Privilege is, after all, the collective advantage of the caste into which one is born. Individuals can steer neurotically, or any other way they might wish, into calamity, and even sever themselves violently from their caste, but the privilege that is the property of the group, is not diminished. Until the revolution, maybe.)

By the way, Helen Oyeyemi is a pretty wonderful writer. I've been a writer, on and off, for the last 60 years, probably three times longer than Oyeyemi has been writing, but I can't touch what she can do. Why is my writing no match for Oyeyemi's. Not imaginative enough? Far less dedicated to the craft? Less disciplined in the effort? Who knows? But it's safe to say that if we were playing basketball, Oyeyemi would be dunking on me at will.

So, that's a good thing that happened that day. I read probably 40 pages in The Icarus Girl, in which Oyeyemi tells the story of Jess, the daughter of a Nigerian woman and a white Brit, an accountant, no less. Jess is a quirky, but loved child who visits her ancestral homeland and befriends a ghostly inhabitant of her grandfather's family compound.

Oyeyemi's control of her work creates numerous chances for her to digress in the service of enriching the story. She quotes Samuel Coleridge, making one of his poem's importance to Jess a way of deepening Oyeyemi's characterization of her 14-year-old character. "And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle around him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise."

It is a bit of forewarning that Jess fails to process. I can confidently say that if I had somehow made myself read that Coleridge poem, I would have encountered those lines without any sense of what they might mean, or how they might make me feel. But reading those lines in the context of Jess's journey, I felt schooled. And moved. And, so, maybe it was a good idea to take the train.

But, no. The train and the book would turn out to be among the many ways I would waste time on the day that began with that morning text from my youngest child, whom I like to call Brendo. Or Mr. Potato Head. The child that Nate and Julie, his much older siblings, like to call Jumpin' (different story, another time).

At the police desk at city hall, I asked one of the officers for a "miscellaneous police report," as I believed I had been directed to do by the last voice I had heard. "No, you have to go to the clerk's office to get the form," the officer said. "Then bring it here and we fill it out. Go to room 107 around the corner and ask them for the form."

Okay. Room 107. Waiting my turn, I stand in line. For an extended period of time that I could only endure and knew, for a fact, that I would not be able to even estimate how m much time would pass, let alone measure with precision.

But finally, I stood in front of a real live person at one of the long line of teller's windows in the clerk's office. Vehicle-registration-and-neighborhood-parking-permit Department. Or Division. Who ever really knows the precise names of these offices, departments, divisions?

"I need the form for the miscellaneous police report," I said to the person before me.

"Oh," she side-eyes me. "You get that from the police desk in main lobby."

Oy.

"Really. They told me that I get it from you and bring it to them."

Nope.

I went back to the lobby. The police officer whom I had first encountered, a sergeant, no less, smiled a greeting. "Didja get it," he asked.

Nope. "They said I'm supposed to get it from you."

The sergeant was incredulous. "C'mon, I'll go back there with you."

So, we walked back to room 107 together. A polite guy, the sergeant signaled to the teller to whom I had spoken earlier, that he would wait to speak to her until she was done with the person she was currently serving. But, feeling that I had long since wasted all the time that any ordinary standard of public service would require me to waste, I spoke up without waiting my turn. A demonstration of class privilege, perhaps?

In the upshot, my impatience, my attempt to make the teller do what I needed her to do, had no effect. "I'll be with you in a moment," she said.

When it was finally our turn, the sergeant spoke, then the teller spoke, then the sergeant spoke, and on and on. I didn't fully understand what they were saying to each other, but it became clear that I had asked the teller for the wrong form and the fault was mine. In any case, she was prepared to give me the correct form, the one that I would take to the police desk in the lobby, hand over to the police and receive, in return, the miscellaneous police report that I would take back to her and hand over, along with a five dollar fee, and receive, in return, a replacement city sticker for our Honda.

"I just need to see your driver's license," she said.

But I could not show her my driver's license, because it was at home, sitting on our copier, where I had left it after having scanned it for the purpose of sharing it with a different city office in an attempt to get a city permit for an entirely different purpose.

"Funny story," I said. "I don't have it. It's at home on my copier."

"Well, I need to see some sort of state ID."

Oy. I sorted through a number of other comments I might make in that moment, but none of them seemed at all relevant to the problem created by the fact that I couldn't produce my driver's license.

I left room 107. On the way out of the building, I stopped by the police desk ion the lobby. The very cheerful sergeant, apparently eager to fill out a temporary police report on my behalf, smiled at me.

"Guess what," I said to him. "I couldn't get the form. I left my driver's license at home."

Determined to help, he suggested that I go to the Secretary of State's office across the street and ask them to issue a replacement driver's license. This did not strike me as a good idea, at the time. But on the way back to the Green Line, I stopped in the lobby of the state office where a number of people were in lines that snaked around corners and ended somewhere out of sight.

I decided that I would go home and get my driver's license off the copier and try again the next day.