THE FRUSTRATING SIDE OF SEARS

Here’s another reason to shop local, or at least to stay away from buying online — and another one of those customer-service nightmares that seem to happen only to me (although I know that cannot be true). It’s also, finally, a warning for anyone buying from Sears.com.

I made that mistake and, following instructions on the back of my receipt, went to the Sears at CambridgeSide Galleria yesterday to return my online purchase, a swimsuit, and get my credit card reimbursed. The instructions were simple: Bring that credit card, the receipt, the swimsuit and packaging. No problem. The swimsuit never even came out of the packaging.

At Sears, though, I was told there was a problem. I was required to bring a printed e-mail holding a confirmation number — something not mentioned, obviously, on the return instructions on the receipt. I pointed this out more than a dozen times over the course of the next hour or so as I climbed the hierarchy of sales clerk, manager and, via telephone, Sears and Sears.com representatives and their respective managers and managers’ managers.

The conversations all began with a Sears worker explaining that this e-mail — back home on my computer — was necessary to the reimbursement process. I would read them their own return instructions from the receipt sent me with the swimsuit. They would reply, “Yes, but we need the confirmation number on the e-mail.” I would repeat that the return instructions said nothing about this. They would reply, “Yes, but we need the confirmation number on the e-mail.” The warning about the return process is also visible on the Web site at some point, I was told, but this proves or resolves nothing. If Sears really wants an e-mail confirmation number, it can say so on its receipt instructions as well as online or in an e-mail.

After all, consider the process: I go to Sears.com, find item, buy item, wait for item to arrive in the mail. When the item arrives on time, I have no reason to go looking back online or in my e-mail. When the item arrives with return instructions printed on the back of the receipt, I get a brand-new reason not to go looking back online or in my e-mail. If I had, isn’t it just as reasonable to conclude that the paper instructions are correct and the electronic wrong as it is to assume the electronic instructions are correct and the paper wrong?

“Yes, but,” they said, “we need the confirmation number on the e-mail.”

Finally, a Sears representative offered a way out: The store could give me a gift card for that amount.

This is retailers’ favorite way of dealing with complaints: “We’re sorry eating our product poisoned you, causing you a week of severe gastric distress. Here is a coupon for more of our product.” But I wasn’t eager to go shopping at Sears again. I insisted that a gift card was an inadequate and unacceptable response to my problem. Another impasse.

Finally, I asked if the store could cash out my gift card. The Sears representative on the telephone said yes, if the store agreed to — never mind that the store manager had called this representative looking for a solution to the impasse. But the store manager agreed to cash out the gift card. Problem solved, in much the same way Jack Nicholson almost got his wheat toast in “Five Easy Pieces,” by ordering a chicken salad sandwich with no chicken salad.

We went upstairs. The Sears manager processed the gift card and an immediate gift card reimbursement. She put the reimbursement, it turns out, on my credit card.

ZEITGEIST LEBENSRAUM

In the words of the Zeitgeist Gallery’s Alan Nidle, “We live to fight another day.”

Last week’s hearing over whether the gallery can legally hold performances resulted in what sounds like, as Nidle described it, a very odd and dissatisfying compromise for everyone involved: The city says the Zeitgeist can go on doing what it wants for a year, but it will be monitored. At the end of the year, the city will decide what to do.

What’s interesting about this compromise is that Nidle doesn’t intend to do anything differently at the gallery, and the city knows it.

The gallery goes on irritating the city. The city goes on threatening the gallery. It’s something like the cartoon relationship between the sheepdog and the wolf who call off their life-and-death battle at the end of the workday.

Perhaps the decision makes sense considering only one gallery neighbor came to the hearing to complain that its performances were a bother — but not much of one. Usually, the neighbor returned home only after performances were over. Nidle thought the neighbor seemed like a pretty nice guy.

(This is something of a trend. Gus Rancatore, who is about to be pushed out of his Someday Cafe location in Davis Square, has pretty nice things to say about Peter Creyf, whose Mr. Crepe would be the replacement. It seems like only in the greater Cambridge area would business owners seem so phlegmatically resigned to acknowledge the finer points of the people ruining their lives — although in each case, these are just stalking horses. Nidle is really threatened by a voraciously officious, officiously voracious city government; Rancatore is falling victim to disingenuously rapacious, rapaciously disingenuous landlord Richard Fraiman.)

It’s unlikely to matter. By the time the city again takes up the matter of the Zeitgeist, the gallery will probably already be on the move to Central Square. Nidle has his eye on the old Skippy White’s space at 538 Massachusetts Ave., where he will add to an already vibrant square but hardly do himself a favor in the “I’m not a club” perception.

ZEITGEIST WELTSCHMERTZ

There’s a hearing scheduled for 8:45 p.m. Thursday that could end, or save, performances at the Zeitgeist Gallery, a vital part of Cambridge’s art and music scene for a dozen years. A Cambridge zoning official, identified by a Zeitgeist supporter as Sean O’Grady, insists the gallery should have a $500 entertainment license and is known to be bringing forward at least one neighbor who opposes performance at the space. (“Today, O’Grady said there were other opponents,” said Rob Chalfen, maintainer of the gallery e-mail list.)

The contradiction is obvious: If an entertainment license resolves the problem for the city, what relevance do complaining neighbors have? Certainly people crabby over avant-garde sound pollution aren’t going to suddenly be satisfied knowing the din that’s suffered is backed by a $500 fee.

The city, it seems, is using the neighbors to make a point, which is that it demands money — the city’s vaunted fiscal responsibility run amok. It’s not dunning the spectacularly endowed Harvard University here, but a small art gallery that happens to think art isn’t just hung on walls.

And the gallery’s Alan Nidle doesn’t want to pay $500 for an entertainment license when he’s only asking donations from people attending, just as you can’t be running a bar if you only give away the booze (and pass the occasional hat). That argument may not hold back the city this time, although it has in the past, and the Zeitgeist may suffer for it.

At a reception to be held after the hearing, Chalfen said, “people can learn about the Zeitgeist’s alternate plan — to move to a nearby space that is both currently empty and zoned for what the city calls theater.”

The Zeitgeist has moved already this year, from space at 1353 Cambridge St. that is now the all-music Lily Pad, to 186 Hampshire St., which was the New Words Collective before that moved to 7 Temple St. A move may be the best thing for it, if it gets the city off its collective — or collectivist — back.

But for a city as boastful of its funk as it is of its fiscal power, this is an awfully grim approach to an enduring source of art and enlightenment, and it seems like part of an ominous trend.

The Brattle Theatre is only halfway to the $500,000 it needs to stay in Harvard Square after the end of the year; Toscanini’s is very likely losing its Davis Square Someday Cafe, and its Harvard Square location will be shut down while the landlord works on the host building — effectively cutting two-thirds of Toscanini’s revenue stream. This follows hard on the heels of the construction in front of Toscanini’s Central Square location that crippled business for weeks.

These are the businesses we need to support. I’ll be at work during the Zeitgeist hearing, damnit, but I hope to stop by the reception afterward to find out what’s going on.

The hearing is at the Senior Center, 806 Massachusetts Ave., across from City Hall in Central Square. The reception will be at the Zeitgeist, Chalfen said, “regardless of the outcome.”

SWIM UNSUITABLE

“Fashion” and “fascism” are not as unrelated as I thought — and this has nothing to do with the recent release of the film of “The Devil Wears Prada,” which recapitulates the lessons of high school (people can be mean, but less so if you dress like them) through the adventures of a comely naif working at a style magazine.

Nothing so photogenic here. I merely went looking for a swimsuit and discovered that, this year, the hem is down to the knees. This is apparently the result of a surfer influence, although it might as well come from gangstas or America’s increasing tendency toward obesity. Or all three. For some reason, every fashion trend we have is making men’s clothes baggier, possibly coalescing into an ideal of obese people surfing with Saturday Night Specials jammed down their shorts.

Shorts? Are they still called that, or are men actually wearing culottes now? It feels that silly.

Who are the fashion decision makers able to so completely lower an iron curtain — perhaps an Indian-sarong-style iron curtain, for an ethnic relaxed look — on the border between two years? While I continued wearing my ancient and anachronistic nylon Adidas shorts, wearing out their lining, the style went from ridiculously minimal in summer 2005 to absurdly maximal now. This is suspiciously Manichaean, as though the decision makers are testing the extent of their powers by jackknifing an entire nation of consumers through fashion changes so extreme that it suggests the ultimate fashion accessory is a look of bewilderment. (For consumers, that is. For models, it remains a look of surly vapidity).

It works, too, as I’ve been unable to find swimsuits that go down to midthigh, even online, just as I’ve found it impossible to buy a three-piece suit. I remember asking a fashion-forward friend about this years ago, only to have him laugh in my face — the concept so absurd, that I would look for something so out of style. What’s replaced three-piece suits are jackets that button all the way up to the sternum, and shoppers are supposed to believe that somehow this won’t look as stupid in a few years as the Nehru jacket does now; the three-piece suit, meanwhile, a staple of coolest-man-ever Cary Grant, is relegated to yuks associated with used-car salesmen and baby-blue crushed-velvet prom attire.

Style is timeless. It’s fashion that’s of the moment, susceptible to the whims of the mad and their manufacture of the frequently unwearable, the kind of stuff that is essentially radioactive: You can’t use it, you’re slightly ashamed of the one time you did use it, but it has an incredibly long shelf life. In short, it’s impractical and fails the test of common sense.

Gangsta wear, for instance, is based on the idea that the baggier the clothing, the more firepower can be hidden within. Divorced from the actual smuggling of weaponry and converted into fashion, you just get a lot of people wearing ill-fitting clothing that makes it difficult to move if, in fact, there’s some sort of situation in which they wished they’d brought a weapon. For many of us, we can’t wear it and embarrass ourselves if we do. Onto the shelf with it.

And gigantic swim trunks? They fail the common-sense test in a different way.

If Americans are so obsessed with being tanned, and find farmer tans so risible, it seems incomprehensible they are now embracing swim trunks that will leave them with gangsta tans. Knees will be a rich, prewrinkled brown, thighs will be like purest milk. Unless it is dictated, perhaps, that we must all adopt the swim trench coat and, as an accessory, the swim fedora by fashion police headquarters (where the fashion police gather to make bitter comments about fashion internal affairs and wonder if things would be better as a fashion state trooper or perhaps if they were promoted to fashion police administration).

Because fashion is art, designers and decision makers will always be able to apply the logic of art — there is none — to what they do, and this makes failing the test of common sense pointless, like complaining that a Dali or Picasso is illogical. But fashion is also big business, and that means there’s something else at work.

It’s the same thing behind the evolution of technology that has us revamping our music collections from vinyl to tape to CD to mp3 and our movie collections from reels to VHS to DVD to whatever’s next. And as soon as what we want to listen to, watch or wear becomes unusable, we’re trapped into committing to an entirely new lifestyle, forced into changing.

I just wanted a replacement swimsuit. Not to look like an idiot. Not to waste my time, nor to despair.

I wanted a swimsuit, not a Brownshirt.

IT IS NOT.

True love lives just past the Interstate 93 tolls in New Hampshire, in the rest stop’s men’s toilet in the stall farthest from the door. It is there that some incurable romantic paused late last year to etch into the smoked-plastic toilet paper dispenser:

DAVE + CARRIE
12-1-05

This raises questions. How long did it take? Was Dave traveling with Carrie at the time? Did Carrie wait impatiently, yell at Dave when he emerged, only to be abashed when he told her what had taken so long? Did Dave ever tell Carrie at all? Has Carrie ever seen Dave’s message of love for her? How did Carrie react? Did she say, “Aw, I love ya, ya big lug”? Did Carrie etch a similar message in the toilet paper dispenser in the women’s room? Are Dave and Carrie still together? Do they visit the rest stop often? And, last but not least: Is this not the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard?

FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMBARRASSMENT

The failure of Senate legislation over “flag desecration” came as a relief and a surprise. When the vote went down Tuesday, I fully expected to experience the ultimate humiliation of living in a country that celebrates its freedoms by taking away the right to burn its flag as a protest or statement of policy — or, for that matter, for fun.

The penultimate humiliation, of course, would be that such legislation passing meant there were huge numbers of people, represented by a majority of U.S. representatives and senators, that failed to grasp the difference between protecting pieces of cloth (probably manufactured in Malaysia) and metaphorically burning the U.S. Constitution, which the pieces of cloth are intended to represent. Anyone who dies in war “for our flag” isn’t really paying attention.

And the legislation failed by only vote. Hardly encouraging, and embarrassing enough on its own, but I’ll take what victories or relief I can get.

Living in the United States is wholly embarrassing anyway, solely because our leaders are such hypocrites. Every time they get up to make a speech they unleash pieties scandalous, if not bitterly hilarious, when contrasted with their behavior. A classic came when President Bush traveled to Turkey in June 2004 to lecture about how “Suppressing dissent only increases radicalism,” a lesson so applicable in his own country and in Iraq — where his military licensed and shut down newspapers, infamously leading to savage rioting (and possibly sparking the entire insurgency) — that one wonders how Bush managed to get the words out.

More recently, in May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unleashed a howler on the graduating class of Boston College:

“It can be tempting ... to opt for the false comfort of a life without questions,” she told the graduates. “Unfortunately, that’s easier to do than ever. It’s possible today to live in an echo chamber that serves only to reinforce your own high opinion of yourself and what you think. That is a temptation that educated people have a responsibility to reject. There is nothing wrong with holding an opinion and holding it passionately. But at those times when you’re absolutely sure that you are right, go find somebody who disagrees. Don’t allow yourself the easy course of the constant ‘amen’ to everything that you say.”

She may have meant this as an unthinking piety, as a rebuke to students she feels are knee-jerk liberals or even as a sotto voce dig at her boss, the president, who notoriously surrounds himself with incompetent toadies and rewards them when their inbred policies inevitably fail. It doesn’t matter how Rice meant it. Her position as a toady to Bush, albeit as the most competent one, removes all moral authority she has to say such things and be taken seriously, just as you don’t want to be lectured on good diet by a McDonald’s executive or discuss the benefits of multiculturalism with a member of the Klan.

Spewing and embracing such hypocrisies seems reasonable, though, in a land where you kill a freedom because you love it and burning a flag can’t possibly be “speech” protected by the First Amendment because it’s, well, so offensive — even if this is the essence of the First Amendment; there are few cases on record of constitutional crises brought on by people asserting that bunnies are cute and love is all around us.

Or, for that matter, that black is white, up is down, left is right, that Bush thinks suppressing dissent increases radicalism or that a Bush aide thinks listening to differing points of view is groovy.

It does, however, seem bothersome in a land where — keep in mind, this is the same land — the Supreme Court affirms that contributing money to a political campaign is constitutionally protected “speech,” a position applauded by many who back an amendment that would criminalize flag burning, and the president says he got permission to tap U.S. citizens’ phones when Congress authorized “force” against Iraq. This is an assertion that becomes all the more astonishing after a reading of the resolution, and even after a reading of relevant portions of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. These documents make clear that the “speech” in which Bush is engaging in regard to his authorization to tap phones is what the average person would call a “lie.” Any member of Congress who swallows this theory shouldn’t be allowed to vote in favor of a flag desecration amendment; you must accept flag burning as “speech” if you accept wiretapping as “force.”

It is embarrassing to live in a country whose most prominent attributes seem to be the capacity to lie and be taken in by those lies. This kind of humiliation can quickly turn to anger, of course. I’m frankly angry enough, and concerned enough, to want to make a strong statement against all of it.

Perhaps burning a flag?

OPEN-MIC NIGHTMARE

Some of the most excruciating hours of my life have been spent watching open mic comedy nights. Years later, I distinctly recall the horrible trapped feeling: sinking in my seat, my gut clenching, eyeing the exit but unable to leave without being seen as abandoning the sad, desperate people taking the stage like concentration camp victims Playing for Time.

Largely because of these experiences, I’d always thought a good way to do comedy would be to tell the audience at the start of a set that laughter was not required or requested — that the comedian simply had some thoughts to share, and if any struck the audience as funny, well, it should go ahead and let loose. This technique has its own drawbacks, which I understand not from trying standup comedy, but from adhering to a kind of Antioch approach to sex: Basically, if you talk too much about what you’re about to do, the spontaneity drains away, leaving only awkward self-consciousness.

The right comedian could still make this work. The wrong comedian would be as screwed as ever.

I’m not talking just as a long-ago audience member. Despite the ancient scarring, I recently immersed myself in local comedy — standup, sketch and improv — and had far more positive experiences once I removed myself from the brutality and tragedy of the open-mic night. (Oddly enough, many comedians say they did great their first time on stage. Then they go chasing that high, more often that not with cruel results.)

When I see bad comedy now, I still wince, my gut still churns a little with discomfort, but I’m able to take a more analytical and less visceral view of it.

I know now, for instance, that “bad comedy” doesn’t necessarily mean comedians aren’t giving you good stuff. They can send out into the audience perfectly funny bits, honed on stages from Dorchester to Worcester for weeks or months, that usually sail out straight and true to perform astonishingly graceful, daring and clever midair loop-de-loops before bowing out with a flourish of enchanting fireworks. But in some places those perfectly funny things just plummet to the ground, one after the other, flailing around and grunting faintly as everyone looks on in horror. This happens where there’s bad comedy feng shui, where some slight jiggering of the comedy club equation — the space between tables, the brightness of the lights, the number of people in the room and lord knows what else must be plugged in as variables — afflicts an audience’s willingness to laugh with a muteness that prevents it. It’s possible to get laughs in The Thirsty Ear, the hidden pub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but attempting it isn’t for the reckless, the amateur or the unlucky. The Thirsty Ear may be the Mount Washington of Cambridge comedy clubs.

It’s also a good venue for observing what comedians do wrong. Destructive or unproductive practices can be missed in a more forgiving room, where laughter can echo or come reflexively long after the funny has stopped, providing cover for a blank or bad stretch. In the Ear, though, every line, every bit, every act-out (I use this comic jargon to show I’ve been paying attention) has to pull its weight.

So while I’m really just a dilettante with no right to speak, largely based on my slogs across the Ear’s comedic desert, I’d advise comics to avoid the following:

“Ladies.” This word is delivered knowingly, winkingly, as a follow-up to revealing a particularly unappealing or off-putting aspect of a male comic’s behavior or persona. For instance, that he’s an engineer. “Lay-dees.” Or that he’s seven feet tall and weighs 410 pounds. “Lay-dees.” This can actually be a funny thing to say, but it’s overused, and trotting it out merely makes the comic look unoriginal. This is no particular comic’s fault; but the word, and ideally the whole self-deprecating shtick behind it, needs to be retired for a while. As an alternative, just don’t be the second or, god forbid, third comic to use it in a single night.

“It’s good. Good stuff. Good times.” [Repeat.] These nonsense phrases come mumbling out as a comic tries to shift gears, but they unfortunately just suggest that the gears are slipping — that, in fact, there’s nothing at all going on inside a comic’s head and, thus, nothing to listen to. This is because these phrases are simply sardonic validations the comic is using to comment on his own material, and they probably wouldn’t be used at all if what was taking place on stage deserved validation, sardonic or otherwise. “Good times,” especially, is something people say because they’ve heard other people say it as ironic commentary in times of mordant distress, and that’s how anybody even slightly versed in humor will take it; using the phrase not only looks like thievery, and lazy thievery at that, but suggests that the user has missed the fact that the irony only works as commentary on what the comic sees, not what the comic says. “We used to take turns clubbing baby seals. Good times” is entirely different from telling a joke that gets no laughs and following it up with “Good times,” just as saying “That sucks” is different from saying “I suck.”

“Okay. It’s funny to me.” This can be good. It also risks sounding like a comic is insulting the audience, making it them versus him, and unless that’s the comic’s thing, it’s a bloody awful thing to do. It makes the audience defensive, which gets them thinking of why the comic is wrong and unfunny rather than giving the benefit of a doubt that something really was funny and missed the laugh it deserved. Finally, it gives the audience a chance to think, “That’s the problem — it’s funny to you, not to us.”

“What else do I got? Yeah … so …” [Looks at watch.] Ugh. Death. This is a cruel world, and nothing sparks an audience’s collective alarm like the suggestion that the person on stage isn’t in control. Jim Morrison, Billy Joel and Ralph Garcey couldn’t get away with it, and you can’t either. The audience will feel trapped, and your hesitation will make it feel agitated as well. Add in a cover charge or a two-drink minimum and you’ll have actual anger to deal with.

Most of these unfortunate phrases are used to fill in time to get from one joke to the next, and the rest is defensiveness springing from the same source: The laughter of the audience is supposed to cover the transition from one joke to the next, and when it doesn’t, the comic stands revealed as inadequate.

Don’t let it happen, comics. Never let the audience see that you’re uncertain, grasping or desperate. Smile as you sink. Connect your jokes with friendly patter, not subconscious mutterings. Relieve your watchers from the need to feel anxious for you, and maybe of the need to laugh at what you’re saying. You may not make it as a comedian, but you’ll save many people from years-long horrors that have them running for the exits before you can even hit the stage.

LOST AND A LOHAN

There’s an atypical and extraordinary post over at Go Fug Yourself, which usually restricts itself to pointing and laughing at celebrity fashion faux pas. The domainatrixes at Go Fug Yourself — the name refers, of course, to something being “fugly,” or “fucking ugly” — tend to stick to giddy gasps of horror when the beautiful and famous transgress or clucks of tongue when they wander into a few common danger zones: bad plastic surgery, bad fake tans, tops that compress breasts into pancakes or let them droop like, well, Kirsten Dunst. And so on.

The bloggers never lost the power to amuse, but I’d stopped expecting to be surprised. Their site’s post about the Lohans was unexpected and bracing.

Using the paparazzi shots that flood daily through Go Fug Yourself’s electronic filing cabinets, the site shows how Lindsay Lohan has clearly wandered into a danger zone far greater than that of the “bedazzeled boots” of Teri Hatcher or red mess Maria Bartiromo wore to suggest “the local brothel’s patient schoolmarm.”

“You can’t ignore that spaceyness in her irises,” blogger Heather writes to Dina Lohan of her starlet daughter. “It’s there. They’re not connecting … Do you not see? How are you letting this happen?”

The site achieves true urgency and poignancy in warning Dina Lohan that her daughter is in trouble. “LOOK AT HER,” Heather writes. “Something’s either missing or overmedicated or has been beaten into submission.”

The case seems damning just scrolling from one out-of-it shot of Lindsay Lohan to another, but the post ends on a shot of her clutching harshly to her younger sister, Aliana, perhaps protectively, perhaps for balance. “Know what scares me the most?” Heather writes to Dina Lohan. “That you have more of them to ignore. I can only hope they don’t get sucked into the vortex. How creepy is this photo?”

The post is a tour de force, and, again, totally unexpected.

Go fug for yourself.

DISNEYWASTELAND

In the past few years Disneyland has added hotels and a Toontown, turned its parking lots into a Downtown Disney shopping district, created an entire neighboring park called Disney’s California Adventure and shut down its hoary Pirates of the Caribbean ride for a movie-inspired revamp.

The park is still the — self-proclaimed — happiest place on Earth, though, and its trash cans still impart the oddest of messages to visitors. Dispersed at roughly one-meter intervals throughout the park, they all ask that visitors “Waste Please.”

The park’s recycling bins merely reinforce the grammatically and environmentally suspect nature of the trash cans. The recycling bins, of which there are about two to every 12 trash cans, urge visitors to “Recycle Please.” There’s no misreading “Waste Please,” then: Waste, please! Mickey says “Waste!”

Hard to believe this peculiarity hasn’t been noticed over the past decade or so. The only other thing that hasn’t changed in the park, apparently, is the “It’s a Small World” ride, which is just as clunky, earnest and maddening as it has been for 42 years. It may inspire people to take high-powered rifles into towers, but at least it doesn’t ask them to be profligate and thoughtless.

PINOCCHIO SYNDROME: I LOVE THE LIES

My newspaper — the one I quit this blog to do — died long ago, but its remnants are everywhere, from the disconnected fax machine to the box of advertising rate cards I can’t bring myself to throw away. Because I’ve been trying feebly to revive it, Cambridge Day also keeps its presence on the Internet; I wanted to keep the event listings coming in, for one thing.

One of the unintended effects of this, though, is that I’m occasionally contacted by people seeking media coverage. I feel bad when I can’t follow through and help.

Especially when they send free stuff.

That’s what the band Pinocchio Syndrome did, providing a nine-song compact disc, publicity still, press release and biography. Having inadvertently conned the quartet into wasting a bunch of effort and postage, not to mention abusing its hopes and good will, I figured the least I could do was listen to the album and pass on what I thought about it.

In short, I wasn’t even done with the first listen before racing furiously for the press release to find out when the band was playing next. I was shattered to find out I’d missed its performance upstairs at The Middle East by less than a day. Hell. It was even more frustrating to find out that, because I’m starting work next week, I can’t get to the band’s May 18 show at T.T. the Bear’s Place. (On the other hand, Pinocchio Syndrome is scheduled to go on at 11 p.m. This makes it barely plausible that I can catch some of the band’s set, given that things are rarely on schedule at rock clubs, let alone rock clubs in the greater Big Dig area.)

I had this reaction, obviously, because I liked Pinocchio Syndrome’s music. This is not the usual metal crap, indie tedium or, thank god, American Idolatry. Indeed, trying to categorize the band merely reveals the pointlessness of the activity. What can I say? That Pinocchio Syndrome is like Primus meets Fiona Apple meets Joy Division, Metric, the Doors, Radiohead and Massive Attack? And that list wasn’t even in any particular order, so anyone gleaning direction from it is almost certainly going to get lost.

To be honest, Pinocchio Syndrome work from the “Free Heat” album is just this side of headachy, but it drones on (the median length of songs is 4 minutes, 13 seconds) in a way that is more epic than monotonous, and it is easy to imagine a live show leaving listeners dazed, stunned openmouthed. When you finish a Syndrome song, let alone an album, you feel like you’ve been somewhere — and that, while it wasn’t so easy getting there, the journey was as important as the destination.

The music is heavy on guitar but rescued by piano. The former makes it grandiose, the latter ironic. The result is a decadence strangely reminiscent of Brecht and Weill, or Jacques Brel, for that matter, particularly when co-vocalist Renee Dominique Greer calls out theatrically “I love ... the lies” and repeats it four more times. “Keep your secrets and tell your lies,” she sings, and one imagines it being sung from one actor to another, with the pounding drums and frenzied strings rising from a pit. “Your 20/20 vision’s got four eyes.”

The band doesn’t traffic in simple love songs, odes to rock ’n’ roll or even polemics, which would sound silly atop its musical excess. Instead, it tells stories aided by Greer and fellow vocalist Max Goransson singing in everything from sullen mutters to outright screaming to Broadway swing, including in the deliciously dissipated, cuttingly sardonic “It Was a Bad Idea from the Beginning,” in which Greer gives full throat to a rollicking jibe at the self-dramatizing:

They’ll talk about you like you don’t even exist
And maybe you don’t, but the whispers persist

You’ve got your razor and you’ve got your reasons
You’ve justified your alibi that you just can’t please them

The funny thing is that the drama in Pinocchio Syndrome’s music is an easy invitation to this kind of earnest excess, even as the lyrics wink and slam the door in its face. You have to work a bit to get the point, including making it past the pretension in the band’s Web bio (“Pinocchio Syndrome began, with time, as a feeling. Then suddenly it was a thought that couldn’t even be uttered, an unfathomable concept.”) before getting to the deadpan giveaways (“You’re either with us or against us, so don’t fuck around”).

The conceit is even suggested — possibly even on purpose — in the band’s name, which says explicitly that all lies are given away if you know where to look. Is Pinocchio Syndrome a chronic condition? A cure would definitely be worse than the disease.

“Free Heat” can be downloaded, for free, of course, at Psyndrome.com.

THIS MOMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY

I just caught a moment of the television show “Fear Factor” in which best friends are obliged to, yawn, eat disgusting things. But these disgusting things were more disgusting than anything I’d seen while flipping past before: a “sausage” of pigs blood and eyeballs and another of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

One woman brought herself to chomp down on the pigs blood and eyeballs — which went bursting out of the skin and spilling over her plate — as the other gaped at the squirming, clacking horror on her plate. “I can’t do it,” she kept saying, touching the sausage tentatively before the giant cockroaches erupted from the thin skin and scattered, slithering, twitching, over the table.

Host Joe Rogan seemed perplexed.

“You couldn’t eat even one,” he said to the woman, who controlled herself and sat back down in front of the creatures. “What happened?”

MUSEUM OF FINE IRK

It wasn’t so long ago that Museum of Fine Art employees told us 9/11 means you can’t stand in corners to look at photographs. It was an even shorter time ago we were told thirsty MFA moviegoers must stay thirsty — because revealing there’s a water fountain just around the corner is apparently not policy. And yesterday my backpack (and laptop) had to be checked in, while my friends’ purses didn’t.

I asked why, and the guard didn’t know. His manager did, though: 9/11. Again.

Bombs fit in backpacks, but not in purses, he told me. “I know,” he told me.

We were not actually at the museum to test whether we’d be irritated every time we went. We were there for the free Art in Bloom event. Foolishly, I spent $5 for the 36-page event guide, thinking somewhere in those 36 pages was some value. After all, there were 70 exhibits of flowers and art over two floors of giant museum, and it would be nice to get the inside story on what we were seeing.

Too bad the guide is worthless.

Just as an example, here’s the text on exhibit No. 48, flowers by the Chicatabot Garden Club’s Jean McCarthy and Linda Meanns of a painted relief of the judge Mehu in the old kingdom Egyptian wing:

This image is a fragment from a large relief depicting a fishing party on the Nile. Mehu is shown from the waist up, facing left, and wearing a long wig, short beard and collar. The colorful paint is well-preserved.

Fascinating, but a bit of a gloss on the material you find posted next to the painted relief of the judge Mehu, which goes like so:

This fragment from a fishing scene shows Mehu dressed in a short, formal beard and heavy wig. Standing in a papyrus skiff (see drawing), he holds a yellow painted harpoon with which he has speared some fish. The bright colors give a vivid impression of the original appearance of all Egyptian tomb wall painting. Two door jambs with images of Mehu and his wife, also from his tomb chapel (see photograph), are exhibited in the corridor adjacent to this gallery.

Information on the flowers? Not so much. Reasons to buy guide? None. Irritation at museum? Consistent.

CREEPING INTO USE

One last thing I think I must do before I get to sleep tonight: Wish you all, whoever’s still reading, my gratitude. This blog is done for a while.

I’m moving on to create a newspaper here in Cambridge, and if tonight is any indication — I think it is — I will not have the time to post. Not with anything worthwhile. Not with anything coherent.

(I assume anyone who would make the obvious joke after reading the past two sentences has long since stopped reading.)

I will make one last Misanthropic observation, or, actually, a last Misanthropicitic observation: The first couple of times I Googled this blog name over the years, I was intrigued to find that there is a gamer out there who rolls by the name Misanthropicity. A little odd, but who am I to raise an eyebrow? Recently, though, I Googled and found that the word “misanthropicity” has begun to creep into use as an ignorant replacement for the real word, “misanthropy.”

Is it my fault somehow? Do I share blame with the gamer? Did he get the name from me? (I sure didn’t get it from him.) Or did I just race ahead of the zeitgeist all the way to pointlessnessicity or idiocity?

I’ll probably never know. But it seems a fitting way to end this blog: confused, confounded, irritated and amused all at once by what people have done through some hard-to-grasp mix of cleverness, ignorance, humor and pretentiousness.

Myself included, I suppose. As usual.

Anyway, again, my heartfelt thanks for reading.

POSTACTIVE

I’m on hiatus, by the way. I thought it rude not to say anything, or to continue not saying anything. I really must remind myself to be more thoughtful about this — to be more, what do they say? Proactive.

MISSING IN ACTUALLY

“Harvard Square is in crisis,” one shopkeeper said tonight after a two -hour public brainstorming session on the square at Christ Church, and the sentiment was hardly unique. While the event offered optimism alongside group critiques of the area, the afterparty was distinctly darker.

Vast sections of prime real estate are empty, even as the cost of renting has dropped dramatically, in some cases, said one real estate agent at the meeting, by $20 a square foot. Foot traffic is down, just as dramatically. The summer was a disaster. The holidays aren’t looking so good, either.

But the primary criticism of the criticism was that, in answering the four questions proposed by the city’s community development department, residents, officials and even business owners revealed a big, bitter truth: There’s plenty of stuff in Harvard Square that people simply don’t know about.

Even in answering question No. 1, “What works well in Harvard Square?,” some negativity crept in regarding how bad the economic picture is. But it was in answering the other questions — “What do you think is missing in the retail mix?”; “Of the things that are missing, what are the top three items that might improve the mix?”; and “Any ideas about improvements that would bolster the retail mix?” — that the awful truth crept in, as six subgroups announced their wishes that the square had a deli, lingerie, late-night cafes, cheap places to hang out, live music you could dance to, housewares ...

It may be argued that the square needs all of the above in more variety, but it was also clear that people were failing to think of Cardullo’s Gourmet Shoppe, Clothwares, Au Bon Pain, Cafe Pamplona, Phatt Boys, Dickson Bros. True Value ...

“And these are the people who live and work here,” a business owner said.

Little was decided at the meeting. At the end, city workers took the six oversized lists away for posting on the Web and further mulling.

A few things were clear, though, made so by appearing on multiple lists: Everyone loathes the banks that have turned prime Harvard Square real estate into a barren video arcade; everyone wants Harvard Square to get a grocery store, whether or not they knew Sage’s died of neglect years ago; and pretty much everyone wants cheap-nonchain-coffee-shops-that-are-open-late-to-hang-out-in-for-hours. And many people suggested that brand management, meaning better public relations, was the way to a Harvard Square resurrection.

“The solution may lie [in funding] a communications firm, which will take the image of Harvard Square as an intellectual, historical and cultural Mecca and revitalize and manage this image over a five-year period,” said one handout, amid complaints about bad press Harvard Square gets locally and nationally.

The idea was not universally embraced.

Walking out of the meeting, one Harvard Square businessperson was heard asking something along the lines of: “Communications firm? What the hell do we have an office of tourism for?”

POSTAL MACHINES

The U.S. Postal Service long-ago introduced self-service kiosks that, at least in Porter Square, still require constant attendance by a postal worker. This seems to defeat the purpose, but, nonetheless, one of two workers hovered over the machine this afternoon, instructing the rare customer in its use while the line languished — growing five deep, then six, then seven.

“Anybody want to use the machine?” the worker asked. “It’ll save you a long wait in line.” Sometimes he amplified his sales pitch by noting that using the machine would save customers a “20- or 30-minute wait.”

When asked why he waited by the machine when there was such a long line of customers, the worker explained that employees on site have “no control” over how they spend their day; a manager for the city, who works elsewhere, decides how employees are used. When asked whether he could get behind the counter and help the lone worker there, doubling the effective staffing of the station, if no one wanted to use the machine … well, no. Even when the worker at the counter had to leave to use the restroom, he was prevented from budging from beside that ridiculous, job-destroying machine.

And when asked if this was frustrating, he replied, “You got that right.”

The worker ran back to her spot behind the counter. The line advanced one space.

From behind, the other worker could be heard making his pitch. When a customer responded, he could be heard assuring the man there was nothing to fear from using the machine.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory,” he said.

SAMPLE PROOF

As if more evidence is needed of the effect “The Simpsons” have had on the world, whitepages.com’s reverse address search offers this: The sample house number is 742; the sample street name is Evergreen Terrace. This is the Simpsons’ address. And, just like in the television show, the state or province is without a sample and it is left unclear in what state the family lives.

Aliens or archaeologists of the far future will keep stumbling across these cultural artifacts, these fossilized indications of our objects of worship, and be astounded. No more so than we should be.

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

Scanning down one of the yummy snack food racks at Quick Food Mart in Inman Square, one finds: Hostess apple pies; Suzy Qs; Yodels and Devil Dogs; packaged fudge brownies and Frosted Donettes; and, at the bottom, several red onions in an open Tupperware container.

These appear to be the healthiest thing in the store, but possibly the least appetizing — at least to my postadolescent American mentality.

OUTSTANDING SERVICE

This will be short. No matter how many people have been burned by Verizon — and the number is roughly equal to how many angels can stand around on the head of a pin complaining — a long rant would be boring and, ultimately, sad. For it would lead to thoughts of how the problem is not Verizon itself, but customer service these days in general and outsourcing and offshoring and the economy and the work ethic and oh it’s not like it used to be.

Still, it’s astonishing that Verizon has done it to me again. I was told to hang around at my new place from 8 a.m. to noon on Oct. 5 for a Verizon phone installer, who was a no-show. At about 5 p.m., when I called to complain about the lack of installation, I was told the installer had indeed shown up. At my old place. He installed two lines there.

I noted to the customer service rep, if one can “note” something at that volume, that in setting up the appointment I had explicitly asked that the installer speak with me before or at least after doing his work, and that I still wanted that to happen when Verizon came to correct the mistake. The rep, Cathy LaMarche — give her a call at (508) 502-1267 — blandly assured me that the installers are required to talk to the customer at installation.

She did not explain how two lines got installed at my old home while I was at the new one.

This required chat failed to happen again this time, yesterday, something I learned upon calling to complain that, once again, kind of, Verizon had failed to show up to install my phone lines. This call took place at 4:53 p.m., when I pointed out that I’d been told to be at home between 1 and 5 p.m. I counted down with the customer service reps.

“Will your installer be here in four minutes?” I asked one.

“Will your installer be here within the next seven seconds?” I had to ask the next one.

It gets weird. I was told that the installer had already been there. I was told there was no request on my file for the installer to speak with me.

I plugged in my land-line phone. No signal.

Later, upon the departure of one of three people who’d been in my apartment during this phone call, a brochure was discovered outside, taped to the door. It was from Verizon.

It said, on the cover, “Outstanding Service.”

It also said Technician IS2 had been at my home at 5:30 to take care of my “telephone service request.” This means the installer was there while I was on the phone complaining. He was there when I'd been told he’d already been and gone.

It’s a half-hour later than the latest time I was told to be at home to meet the guy. Is it the start time? The time he left? Was he there for 31 minutes? Or one? Obviously the time given was more than a half-hour after I called Verizon to complain he wasn’t there. In fact, I was on the phone with Verizon for an hour, two minutes and 44 seconds — the digital call log being one of the prizes of cell phones.

Twice I haven’t had to be home while Verizon workers came and did work for which they insisted I be home. Twice they’ve screwed it up. And one more twice:

Inside the brochure, I’m told to “Please refer to this number when contacting Verizon.”

And I’m told, “If you have questions or concerns relating to this visit, please call ...”

Neither number has been filled in.

BLIND TO GO

The U.S. Postal Service sent me a relocation packet that includes a $25 coupon (off any purchase of $500 or more) from my local Blinds To Go outlet.

Surely this is one the stupidest business names ever registered. It was apparently needed to differentiate the chain from those catering to buyers who wanted to keep their window dressings on site rather than take them home for installation.