DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A month ago I wrote about the Auto Alliance’s ad campaign claiming that new cars are “virtually emission free,” and the Union of Concerned Scientists’ sarcastic response (depicting a stoned-looking baby smoking a cigarette).

The UCS sent a followup email to report on the success of their campaign:

• 24,000 people requested that the FTC investigate the Auto Alliance’s claims. The FTC responded: “The communications we have received are already more than ample to allow us to begin evaluating the substance of the complaints.”
• 1100 people donated a total of $40,000 to finance the UCS’ response advertisement, calling out the Auto Alliance for deliberately misleading the public. The UCS has placed its ad in print and online media and will be distributing full-color reproductions to the entire Congress and Senate.

The UCS reports,

[T]he Auto Alliance has remained publicly resolute on this issue… commenting in an auto trade press article that “they will not stop using [the ads].” But we have heard from a number of different sources that individual automakers are reconsidering this ad campaign, and have, to this date, stopped running the ads in the Washington, DC media they had been saturating before.

In other words, thanks to your actions and generous contributions, the Auto Alliance is now well aware that their misrepresentations will not go unchallenged. We will continue to push auto companies to play a constructive role in cleaning up vehicle emissions, but when they attempt an end run around the facts, we will expose their deceptive practices to decision makers and consumers.

I hate to even mention this, because there’s a chance it will tip one more person over the edge into a maelstrom of change. I’m sure I don’t even see the whole scope of the change yet, but I’m awed by the tiny piece of the iceberg that has penetrated the surface of my consciousness.

It started with this introduction to GTD. Don’t read it. Seriously. Because a casual read could turn into a couple hours’ worth of poring over documentation, the purchase of a book and a pile of new software applications, and a couple weekends’ time reorganizing your entire existence.

I’m not writing this from the perspective of someone who has mastered a new skill and is eager to gloat, nor from the perspective of a new convert eager to proselytize, but rather from the perspective of someone who has glimpsed the possibility of something incredibly useful and life-affirming and is taking baby steps in its direction while fearfully clinging to the blackboard of old, bad habits with the untrimmed fingernails of obstinance.

And yet, I’ve purged my desktop. This was “step 0.” The aspect of GTD that fit into my brain like a crowbar into a rusty padlock appeared in one of the many personal testimonies and interpretations of GTD that I’ve read over the past two weeks: have a single inbox. Don’t let your whole life — your desk, your calendar, your office, your car, your house — represent a collection of not-done tasks. This was my first Zen slap. I looked at my desk: piles of stuff. My office: piles of stuff. My house: piles of stuff. In fact, at that very minute, I remembered having left a bank deposit on the floor of the passenger seat of the car.

Purging my desktop was a small milestone, hopefully representative of bigger achievements to come. This weekend, I’ll purge my desk. Then my office. Then the project-overflow space in the den. In widening concentric circles, I’ll regain control.

I’ll admit that this is a scary process. Getting organized is a fractal project: no matter how much detail you see, there’s always another entire universe of complexity at the next zoom level. Put another way, my clutter is recursive. And the last thing I need is yet another task for the to-do list.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

My 4-month-old son has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for two massive, head-jerking, whiplash-inducing double takes. Before old age takes over and my brain finishes ossifying, I’ll commit the stories to the global digital archive, which unlike my memory has a decent chance of lasting more than 15 minutes.

Last Fall, my forward-thinking (and still-pregnant) wife retrieved an infant doll from the toy bin at her office, with the idea that we could practice diapering without the added stress of a wailing baby, flailing limbs, or fresh warm feces. I wasn’t particularly motivated to play papa with the doll, so I ignored it, and like anything that sits in one place in the house awaiting attention for a couple days, it became invisible. I forgot about it.

Then one day, in a rush to shower and dress for some event or other, I dashed into the bedroom. Out of the corner of one eye, I spied what appeared to be a newborn baby laying naked on its back on my side of the bed, arms reaching up as if to say, “Just because I was born a couple weeks early doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a diaper right about now.”

It’s totally unreasonable to believe that (a) my wife would give birth without my knowing or (b) even if she had, that she’d leave the baby unattended and naked in the bedroom, on my side of the bed no less. Just tell that to my visual cortex. Or my heart, which stopped.

The second neck-wrencher happened just a couple weeks ago. It, too, regards diapers, but then what about newborn babies does not? Raphael was in the middle of a diaper change when I noticed, glancing sideways from one eye, what appeared to be a clump of gray pubic hair on his testicles. The juxtaposition of old-man-pubic-hair with hairless-newborn-infant was too much to process rationally. Had my head spun any faster I might have knocked the house off its foundation.

The hair turned out to be a piece of fuzz from the lamb’s wool playmat, which I’ve now taken to shaving daily as preventive maintenance for my cervical spine.

We lost the most recent* ANWR vote, but apparently it’s still not too late to prevent oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Check out the Earth Day Virtual March. Sign up today; have your signature delivered to your senators on Earth Day (April 22).

The Virtual March is a joint project of Care2.com and Defenders of Wildlife. So far, over 15,000 people have signed up.

(See: Talking Points on ANWR)

*Remember that Bush’s desire to drill for oil in the wildlife preserve has been beaten numerous times before. He won the most recent vote, but that’s only one of many. Common sense may yet prevail.

Steve Heimoff of Wine Enthusiast Magazine wrote a puzzling story for the weekend Chronicle magazine: a tale of forgotten reservations at a high-end restaurant. It’s a quick read, and worth a couple minutes: Without Reservation: The price one pays for a world-class dining experience

Anyone familiar with the Northern California culinary scene will recognize in less time than it takes to smoke the saute oil that Heimoff is writing about The French Laundry. Yountville becomes “Yondertown,” The French Laundry becomes “La Lavanderie du Paris.” The famously elusive reservation agent, the long drive, the months-long wait for a table all stay the same.

Two things about this story fascinate me. One is that Heimoff got away with $300 worth of the best food in the country, for free. Sure, he had to eat it in his car. I’ll admit that even Thomas Keller’s star would shine a bit less brightly if he was working at a drive-through. But still.

The second thing is the transparency of Heimoff’s fiction. Maybe the whole story is a ruse, a poke at the ridiculous over-the-topness of the entire French Laundry experience. Or maybe Heimoff has a bitter pill to grind, to remix a metaphor, as would anybody who drove for two hours in a suit, anticipating three hours of culinary pampering, only to be turned away at the door.

But if it really happened, why not write about it? Why disguise it?

Curiously, Heimoff’s “Yondertown” morphs to “Yonderville” by the middle of his story, rending a hole in the thin gauze of fiction.