The Festrunk Brothers

Today while attempting to endure a nothing day at work I spent some time paying bills. Nothing too crazy there, I seem to be in a constant process of paying people or promising to pay them later -- but because we're again at the beginning of a new month, rent is due.

Rent is the only bill I pay with a check.
Rent is the only bill I send via regular mail.

When you get right down to it -- rent is pretty much the only reason I even have a checkbook. It's absolutely the only use I have for postage stamps anymore. 

I have a good landlord, I have a nice place. This is the way he likes to do things, so whatever -- shut up and mail the check; but it occurred to me as I watched my brain attempt to recall the idea of handwriting with appallingly shoddy results -- I had that moment where the generational lines sort of appear in my mind like a first down marker on a TV broadcast football field.

"Oh man, I need to void this check and do it again -- the letters are all uneven and sloppy."

Like I was literally going to rip up a check and redo it over the concern that my landlord would furrow his brows over the undisciplined curves of my script and think less of me as a functioning member of society. Or worse, some amalgamation of all my elementary school teachers would rise from the ether and smack my hand with a ruler until I exhibited the proper form and style.

Moments later I still ended up jamming the thing into an envelope marked with equally awful scratching intended to represent sending and return addresses, but it's hard not to wonder if anyone under a certain age would even hesitate at this sort of issue.

Sometimes you come to these little fault lines in our world. Places where the efficiency of technology crashes into the edifices of the age you were raised in. 

THANKS OBAMA

My handwriting was never stellar, but I used to have to use it for everything. People had to understand it in order for me to communicate with them, so I had to keep it at a certain level of respectability. Believe me, I was happy to step through the looking glass to a world where typing was king. Life got easier in many respects because of that advance. 

But this idea that awful handwriting is the sign of a crappy education sort of sticks with me. 

I think it's part of the reason the rise of social networking brought forth all the Grammar Nazis. All the comic sans haters. All the disdain for the increasingly abbreviated and codified way people communicate with each other online. 

Once upon a time you saw junky handwriting combined with terrible grammar and you couldn't help but connect the dots. 

Nowadays you just get this:

Like, seriously -- who the fuck is Chuck Manchioni?

This whole idea of your ad, this supposed "classing up" of the music scene in this town was all but invalidated the moment that you revealed to all of us that you somehow don't know how to spell "Steely Dan."

And yet if I give it maybe two more seconds of thought -- is this that big a deal? I'm on twitter, I have a teenage son -- I've seen what passes for communication anymore. The guy who wrote this might be some hipster who embraces their ironic tastes without actually knowing what the hell they're talking about. Who knows, maybe he's just European or something.

Whatever the case, shouldn't I try to get past my old school hangup about how the quality of your communication reflecting on the kind of person you might be? Especially since I kinda wouldn't mind being in a band like this?

Hmmmm...

[Now Playing:  Thelonious Monk - "Straight, No Chaser" ]