Episode 5: Citizen Lame

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If you can commit to mediocrity with an award-winning level of consistency, you are definitely subscribing to the Rike Podcast, the Dream Battery Society, hosted by the podcast equivalent of lukewarm clam chowder, Peter Conway.

Cold Open: Lukewarm Clam Chowder

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I've reached the point in the development of my cynicism where I no longer believe anyone who says, we just need to make one quick stop. Those words have never once been followed by anything quick. It's like hearing someone in a disaster movie say, I'll be right back. No, you won't. You just don't know it yet. One quick stop has become one of the great works of fiction, like War in Peace described as a quick read. A quick stop isn't a destination. It's an opening gambit that starts innocently enough. We just need to run to lows. Perfect. I'll be back in the truck in five minutes. Time me. Fort three minutes later, you're standing in an aisle 17 holding a package of screws you didn't know existed, while someone named Homer explains the difference between galvanized, coated, exterior rated, stainless steel, self-tapping, structural, and contractor grade. At that point, you're no longer shopping, you're auditing a metallurgy course. And it never stops with the one thing you came for. You walked in for light bulbs, now somehow you've convinced yourself it's finally time to organize the garage. So you leave with storage bins, shelf brackets, three stir sticks, a shop towel, two bungee cords, and one of those tiny pencils they give you in the lumber department, which, for the record, I have never intentionally taken home and yet somehow owned 14 of them. The same thing happens at the grocery store. We only need milk. Wonderful. 10 minutes. Then somebody says, Well, while we're here, those four words have probably cost Americans collectively three years of their lives. While we're here has no upper limit. You can justify anything. We're already here. We might as well look at patio furniture. Patio furniture, we came for dairy products. How did we wander into outdoor living? And before you know it, you're standing in front of a display of decorative throw pillows having a serious conversation about colors you didn't even know existed. The artist formerly known as beige has been replaced by oat, sand, linen, and something called morning fog, which I'm pretty sure is what my grandfather used to call his hangover. Morning fog isn't a pillow, it's tomorrow's weather. I've come to believe every errand has two versions. The one you schedule and the one that actually happens, because life has a remarkable ability to turn one quick stop into an entire afternoon, and somehow we keep believing it. I have fallen for this so many times, I'm beginning to think I'm the problem. Welcome to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.

Welcome & Battery Check

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Greetings and salutations, listener. I am your host, Peter Conway, and I do happen to like clam chowder. New England clam chowder, not that nasty Manhattan stuff. I am here to shepherd you through old er age. At its core, the Drain Battery Society is here to give back pain a voice. I'll tell you a few jokes you can relate to, talk about truths that apply to all of us of a certain age, make a kind recommendation because it's not all about complaining that there were too many kids in the barbershop last Saturday. We have our own vocabulary, a worldview, even. And it's developing nicely. We'll try to give you a few lines you can use to impress your friends and co-workers. Hey, I'm here to help. That's why it's a society and not a lithium ion fire hazard. We're in this together, trying to navigate modern advanced adulthood. So I hate to make those cheesy segues that are a play on the show's concept, like what's draining your battery this week? But really, we're up and down on that charge level for all intents and purposes, right? Um charge level. Never full, never fully empty. We're like perpetually meh. Last week I felt like my battery got up to 74%, which is pretty outstanding. But after one night this week, I'm already down to like 33%. And here's why my battery's drained. I live in a neighborhood near some train tracks, and I am a notoriously light sleeper. I've been using brown noise to help me sleep for almost two decades, so I can't put earplugs in, and I've never found a pair of earplugs that work anyway. So the trains, they go north and south, as anyone with half a brain understands. So I suppose they could go east and west, but anyway, that's likely why it took me 15 years to figure out, is because it takes half a brain and I just don't have one. The hard part is that where I live, they cross over several streets and they have to blow the horn before each intersection. So I have this mental image of a 22-year-old kid learning how to be an engineer, laying on that horn with various combinations and levels of obnoxiousness. Like his pre-horn routine consists entirely of the statement, watch this. The eight o'clock goes by, eight fifteen, then the eleven, the eleven thirty, midnight, three fifteen a.m. six. What the actual F word. It's like we never invented planes or cars to get anywhere. I get jacked up about doing this podcast, so I'm up sometimes until midnight, writing and producing episodes and spots. What it has done is brought to the forefront the glaring need to have a hard stop at 10 and lights out at 11, which means naturally I get my best ideas at 11.09. And then I'm up at 5.45, so I can have plenty of time to be late for work and you know, just sit there, have my first sip of coffee and wait for the train horn to blast. I hate it. This week has been the longest month of the year so far, and I I I really do. I I want to stop crawling out of bed like it's time to make the donuts. I don't want to hear how much your life is like mine. I just want to know how much worse yours is. I need to feel good about me, as my mother used to say, right? Jesus Christ, you two, it's not a competition. I know your battery is down. Email me at battery drain at drained battery society dot com. Tell me about it. I'd love to hear from you. Truly. Those two Yahoos from Ohio are wearing me out. Before we find ourselves with an itchy mouth rash from all this talking, I'd like to let you know that today's podcast is brought to you by passive aggressive greeting cards. Sometimes congratulations implies more than you want it to. That's why every passive aggressive greeting card says exactly what you're thinking, politely enough that nobody can prove what you actually mean. Choose from favorites like thinking of you, mostly because you haven't returned my ladder, or happy birthday, you're aging as expected. One of our most popular for the workplace is congratulations on your promotion. I guess they were looking for someone. For the lucky couple, we have congratulations on your engagement. Third time's the charm. Your feeble neighbor will love get well soon, your lawn needs mowing. And everyone will eventually need sorry for your loss. At least parking was easy. Send the message everyone else is thinking with a passive aggressive greeting card. A nephew company.

This Week's Main Topic

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What I'm finding is that every time I buy something that makes me happy, I need to spend extra for the defense attorney protection plan. I'm questioned about everything I buy that might bring a smile or a little enjoyment. I have to justify my acquisition with phrases like, it was an investment, or it was on sale, or of course I'll use it. And what I want to say is, it's a toy and I wanted it. I want things that remind me of better days. One of those giant $800 Star Wars Death Star Lego sets, a life-size Millennium Falcon, lower cholesterol. But every time I think about saying to hell with it, I remember the 40-year-old Virgin. Why? Why is that funny? Nobody makes fun of the guy who spends $4,000 on golf clubs. Explain to me why golf is respectable, but Legos are immature. Why does society draw the line at tiny Danish bricks? Which brings us to the Dream Battery Society Universal Truth number 115. If it brings you joy, someone your age will tell you that you're too old for it. Fishing boat? Good for you. A Harley? Perfectly acceptable. Midlife crisis? Maybe. Questionable, but you know, still within the limits of acceptable, but an afternoon playing Moto GP24 on the PlayStation? You're too old for that. The thing about the Lego set is that I don't even want to play with it. I want to build it. I want to spend six quiet hours putting tiny pieces together while no one asks anything of me. The phone is on silent, Amazon's allowed to just drop the package on the porch, I can let it sit. I don't have to worry about the Wi-Fi needing a reboot. That's not childhood. It's therapy. Kids today don't even understand Lego. They build it, take a picture, post it on Instagram, and then take it apart. Generation X wants to build it, put it on a shelf, and keep it accessible as a makeshift weapon in case someone breaks in. Actually, I don't have a PlayStation. I'm on my seventh Xbox. I am a bit dismayed at the migration toward online play with the Xbox. I don't want to play online. I don't need some eight-year-old named XX Sniper69420XX telling me I suck. I know I suck. My hands hurt, and I have to pee between pod races. You probably have your own version of this. Maybe it's model trains, maybe woodworking, if so, let's talk. Fishing gear, a classic car, vinyl records, a thousand dollar meat smoker. Insert your own joke here. Maybe it's a craft room, an entire drawer of full fountain pens, or maybe you own nine guitars and can only play three chords. Poorly. It's like my golf game. Everybody has something, is the point. You remember in the second Santa Claus movie when Tim Allen takes over Elizabeth Mitchell's faculty holiday party and he starts giving out those toys they loved as kids? That's what I'm talking about. Mine just happens to destroy fictional planets. When I was a kid, and this story is not going to make me sound better by any stretch of the imagination. And when I was a kid, I remember playing pole position on my Atari 5200. Remember those? And I had this friend, the same one that everybody has, I think, that is just as good at whatever they try, right? Could be a video game, expert. Pick up a tuba that's laying over in the corner, even better. So I had my friend over to play, and he whipped my ass from sunup to sundown. Not proud of it, but I was screaming, sweating, throwing the controller every time I got beat. And this kid was laughing at the scene I was making. I g I don't know, I think I would have been horrified, but I just wanted to win. I want to think that I'm far more mature now. I don't quit because I lose. I quit because it's 7 30 and Jeopardy's on. I don't throw the controllers either. They're 80 bucks apiece now. I don't know. Maybe we're reaching the age where we realize that we don't need the things we enjoy to be productive. It should be enough that it makes us happy. We've been productive for 35 years. We raised kids, paid mortgages, worked overtime, fixed the house, took the mother-in-law on vacation, mowed grass, balanced the checkbook. If I want to spend a Saturday quietly building the ship that made the kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, that's productive enough. Maybe one day I'll buy that Millennium Falcon. Not because I'm trying to relive my childhood, but because I'm trying to enjoy what's left of my adulthood.

Commercials

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SPEAKER_00 12:59

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We know you clicked accept all cookies without reading. We know you bought those orthopedic shoes at 3 a.m. We know everything. And we just sold your digital soul to a mid-tier insurance company for four cents. Don't look so shocked. You gave it to us for free so you could watch videos of dancing cats. Thanks for the cookies. With love, Apex Data.

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Hello, friends. Let's get back to more unfounded opinions on the Drain Battery Society.

Nobody Needed This

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It's time again for Nobody Needed This, the segment in which we champion those courageous inventors who looked around at society and then made something that drives it into the ground. Today's something? Diet water. Yep. You might even be drinking one now. If you are, put it down and listen. Actually, forget that. Cap it. You need to hear this. For years, doctors, nutritionists, athletes, and every fitness instructor ever have been telling us to drink more of it. I had no idea, but it turns out it was making us fat. And that's why I switched to beer. I'm kidding. Somebody said, Water's good, but we can do better. Water, which has been batting a thousand since forever, had a big part in Noah's Flood, if I'm remembering this correctly. Zero sugar, zero calories, zero fat, zero cholesterol. But sure, it's not pulling its weight. Do you think diet water gives regular water body image issues? Imagine being regular water. You've had a flawless record for the last four billion years. You kept dinosaurs alive. You floated ships across the ocean. You helped build every major civilization on Earth. Then one day you show up for work and they tell you there's a newer, younger, thinner, more attractive version of you. I know the feeling. It stings a little. Diet Water sounds like it's made by the same people who will soon manufacture gluten-free ice cubes or organic oxygen, low carb toothpicks maybe. When do we as a people decide we've officially run out of things to improve? I picture somebody sitting in a beige room with grey cubicles bouncing a stress ball off the ceiling, thinking to themselves, if they could only convince people that water was healthier, they'd drink more. There could be focus groups, prototypes of labels, fonts, and names, and then once it was ready, it would need an enemy. And then one appeared. Four and a half billion years ago. Water. Strap up, old buck, you're playing with the young stallions now. This imaginary dreamer sitting there in the cube with the stress ball had some balls himself. I don't know what was in Diet Water, but I know what wasn't. Necessity. The funny part is not the product itself, it's the people who buy it. They believed that there was a chance they'd been drinking the wrong water all these years and they needed to give themselves every opportunity to live forever. Like the dinosaurs. That's the real product. It's not hydration, it's hope. Hope that the shortcut to a healthier life was hiding in a bottle that looked almost identical to the one sitting right next to it. And that's why Diet Water is the recipient of this week's Solution Seeking a Problem Award, and it is an automatic finalist for the Nobody Needed This Hall of Fame, which I just invented. Because when you have to improve on water, it's probably time to stop inventing things. Congratulations, you donkeys.

Recharge Recommendation

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Simplicity is sometimes the hardest thing to figure out. We all make life more complicated than it needs to be. We might be getting older, but you know, we're still learning. I used to be the guy who could work all day, go out until four in the morning, sleep for a couple of hours, and then get up and do it all over again. Maybe you were too. That changed when I had kids, but not by much. Just the bedtime got adjusted a little bit. But you know, now as the as the hair gets grayer and retirement gets a little closer, I've realized there's one thing I absolutely have to have if I want to function the next day. Sleep. We started this show talking about the trains that run roughshod through my neighborhood. I admitted I'm a light sleeper. It's not just noise, though. It's light. As our kids get older, they get driver's licenses, cars, and a social life that apparently doesn't begin until we're ready for bed. So like Motel 6, we leave the light on for 'em. The difference is we're not staying awake until they get home. No chance. You know, when I was writing this, I had one eye on the clock waiting for my hard stop at ten. That's that's really what I've become. But for years I figured five hours of sleep was a great night. Four hours? Manageable. Three? That happened more often than I'd like to admit. But then my better half performed a public service for which I will be forever grateful. And I'm not kidding. She gave me the albatross health New England Premium Sleep Mask. Black, if you must know. Ten bucks on Amazon. This thing is fantastic. It's true blackout. Light doesn't sneak in around the edges. It's lightweight, stays cool, the strap adjusts easily, and it even comes with a little travel pouch. I bought a second one just to keep in my suitcase. It doesn't even press against your eyes, which is important if, you know, like me, you're blessed with luxurious lashes. I did have to figure out how to keep it from annoying. One of my ears kind of dug in a little bit, but I cracked the code, just angled the strap a little higher on the back of my head. Good to go. All sounds great, right? Let's talk turkey for a second. Many of us sleep next to another human being. We do that because we've committed to each other, and occasionally we commit to romance. The sleep mask does absolutely nothing to help with that. By the time the retainer's in, the carpal tunnel brace is strapped on, and the sleep mask is secured, the only thing getting turned on is the CPAP machine. It's less date night and more medical equipment staging area, but the sleep is glorious. So this week's Drain Battery Society recharge recommendation is the Albatross Health New England Premium Sleep Mask. Ten bucks on Amazon, because Abishon Hardware doesn't sell them yet. Pick one up. You'll probably end up buying two. And when you finally sleep through the night in perfect darkness, I will quietly accept your gratitude.

Listener Email

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So the Drain Battery Society mailbag got a few good submissions this week, but the thing I was most pleased about is that we're getting closer. And I mean that in a geographical way. This week's email actually comes from Boston. I figure a few more weeks and we'll be up to Hayville. And it's just a hop, skip, and a jump from there. Actually, I laughed when I read this because I've asked myself the same question. I'd see if it applies to you as well. Mike in Boston wrote, PETA, I'm kidding. I have a serious question. All right, let me stop you there, Mike. You've heard the show, and what part of it did you decide we deal with serious issues here? All right, he continued. At what point do you officially become old? Is it when AARP sends the envelope? I think for me it was last weekend. My wife and I had plans to go to a specialty store and get a bird feeder and some seeds and a stand. We're starting to enjoy watching the different birds that come into the yard. Mike, that should have been your first clue. He says he spent a solid hour researching feeders, the best stands, and the seed they needed after identifying all the birds in the yard. Mike, I'm dying to know whether you named them yet. The birds, I mean. Email me, let me know. Mike says he's concerned. He went on to say the podcast trailer made him laugh or made him laugh. Sorry. And he he's looking forward to more. I think he means birds. All right. Thanks for the email, Mike. You made my week. I will tell you that my better half works from home and loves watching the birds. Like binoculars and everything watching the birds. Several years ago I put up a post with four hangers, just a you know, pressure treated four by four. Um attached four hangers. We went out and got um four different kinds of feeders to hang on and large bags with all the kinds of seeds the birds like. We were having a problem with squirrels, and I thought maybe bears, so we put up a metal baffle, and as I was putting that up with her, I realized I was starting to care. Later I caught myself saying, That's not a finch, that's a nuthatch. I knew right then I'd crossed a line. I wasn't helping birds anymore. I was engaging in an embargo against squirrels. They're not getting this food. That's for the birds. But that's when I realized there might be an issue, right? I paid close attention and realized I was learning bird names and I was pointing out those birds to her. I was recognizing calls. Honestly, I think she was getting a little excited about my progress. Too bad I'll be wearing that sleep mask in a few hours. Anyway, Mike, it's not the AARP Miller. It's not the gray hair. Some people get that really early, others really late. Society, government programs, and scientific studies point to 65, 75, or older when we get old. The United Nations and the U.S. Older Americans Act uses 60 as the milestone. I am not a fan. Medicare and the Census use 65. I like them. The public generally accepts old as 74 or 75. So that's the new sweet spot. You are not even considered young old until you hit 65, Mike. Relax. Enjoy your birds. Just don't name them. Once you name them, it's over.

Closer

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And that's it for the week. I've loved hanging out with you today, listening to you laugh. Next time, if you wouldn't mind, would you stop reading the onion and listen to the podcast instead? As I've been asking for quite a while, email closer to home would be great. Send me something. Email mailbag at drainbattery society.com. If I use your email, I'll send you some society merch. Straight up trade. High quality. Coveted by almost everyone living in my truck bed. Send me your deepest, darkest confessions for the things nobody admits show's coming up, or let me know you want to contribute with voice work or guest on the show sometime if you have something to say. I'm easy. Just ask the $1,000 meat smoker. Thousands of dollars were not paid to this week's vocal maestros, Sean Q and Kimberly Q Delaney. If their voices sounded somewhat similar to you, it's because these spots were produced before Kim became Sean. This week's theme music was brought to you by the DadVice Consulting Group. Can I give you one little nugget of wisdom? Own one really good flashlight. Never trust a ladder with someone else's name written on it. And if someone starts a sentence with, you know what your problem is? Leave. Alright, that was technically three pieces of advice, but that's what you can expect from the DadVice Consulting Group. More. Decades of experience solving problems, we probably created ourselves. The DadVice Consulting Group. If you'd be so kind, subscribe, tell a friend, tell family, tell everyone on social media, I'm not choosy. Three guiding principles here at the show, and you can sing them along with me. Get off my lawn, keep your battery between 20 and 80 percent, and keep your expectations low. We'll probably exceed them. Next time. Thanks for listening to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.