I keep waiting for New York magazine to call and ask for my take on the “What I Can’t Live Without” column, but for some unexplained reason they never do, so I figured I would go ahead and describe those items here. 

Birkenstocks. Specifically, the Arizona: the traditional ones, the ones without a heel strap, the ones without fur, or any kind of bling. The ones with strong arch support, cork footbed, and an ugly, European disposition. They take a little while to break in. I’ve probably run through six pair over the past twenty years. I use them until the cork looks like desiccated coral, flaking off on the kitchen flooring. They don’t like getting rained on, and I think there are cork sealant products that I could apply, but I always forget. I don’t intentionally get them wet, but sometimes one is out walking the dog and an early evening thunderstorm pops up, and one is simply up the creek, as the saying goes. I like how the waffle-like indentions in the rubber soles slowly wear away with time. Perhaps this happens equally with other footwear but it’s particularly pleasant with Birkenstocks. Practical, comfortable, ugly, the ideal footwear. Plus, the sight of my uncovered toenails frightens away predators. 

Spotify. I realize that there is a long list of valid criticisms of Spotify, namely that it pays artists fractions of pennies through an algorithmically rigged application that primarily benefits the already mega-successful. But in listener terms, it’s a revelation. As a kid in the 80s and 90s it was a dream to be able to call any song forth and listen to it at that very moment. I remember driving through rural Georgia in the middle of the night in 2003 on the way to Florida to attend my own wedding when I desperately wanted to hear a new song that I’d heard perhaps twice, only in fragments, irresistibly catchy, and I scrolled through the static-y radio stations for an hour until I found it. Now you can just call it up. If it’s not on Spotify, then it’s probably on Youtube. I realize not everything is available, and I realize that this near-perfect availability is bad for the artists, but what can I do? It’s 14-year-old me’s version of the Holy Grail. Points deducted for trying to use the app while driving, always a pain. I know I should not be doing that. I should keep my eyes on the road, on what’s coming next, but sometimes you want to synchronize your commute to the perfect tune. P.S. that midnight-through-Georgia song was “Hey Ya.”

Google Docs. After a certain word count, it gets a little squirrelly, and I don’t ever do any serious formatting. But for typing words, keeping words, being able to access words on multiple machines in multiple locations, it works. What I hate about software generally is its apparent need to update frequently. Just when I am comfortable with an application, someone somewhere changes it, and it takes me forever to figure out how to replicate my cherished routine. I don’t always want a better design. I just want to live with the original mistakes because by now I am used to them. Those features are no longer mistakes but just the way the world works, the way this piece of hardware or software was put together, how one’s life panned out, and any structural improvement only creates more friction. I use Word less and less now, a shocking realization, as twenty years ago I lived in Word. Now my preferred on-the-machine word processor is the humble Notepad. Yes, that’s right. I am working on a Dell. I used to be able to afford those silver sexy laptops, but then I had children, and now I work in a Dell world. There is no formatting with Notepad, no pages, no sex appeal. But it has two fabulous attributes. It is screamingly fast, and it can be transferred to any other kind of device. (In case my child let’s me borrow their silver laptop.) No, you can’t use italics, but I overuse italics anyway, and besides one should be adding that kind of stuff later. For getting words down in an order somewhat approaching an English sentence, it’s the best freeway. Google Docs has more latency, but the access and the inherent cloud back-up makes it mostly worthwhile. I keep waiting for Google to start charging me money for storing all of those rough drafts, like an abandoned self-storage megalopolis of unfinished dreams, but I keep skating by year after year. Another quality I like is that Docs makes computer work (at least the prosaic kind I do) more independent of the actual machine. I work on my documents and my spreadsheets, and they are saved to a server somewhere, and then I access them again. I don’t want to work on the machine itself. I don’t want to customize. I am not a programmer. Some people are! I am grateful for them. But I want my toaster to make toast, and I want to be able to get to my toast wherever I am. I want to be able to burn my toast or not burn my toast, but otherwise I don’t really want a lot of toast-gradiation leeway. I don’t need predictive toasting. I just want to make the bread browner, toastier, depending on the day. I want to be able to send and receive short bits of text and add and divide various combinations of numbers in peace without having to think of how the machine works, if it’s good for human civilization, or perhaps talking behind my back to the HVAC. Occasionally I want to watch old footage of Little Feat playing “Cold Cold Cold” in Holland and send it to my friend. No, I haven’t binged that new 7-part series. There’s no time for that. I still haven’t finished all those books I bought when I was 24.

Polo Ralph Lauren Oxford-Cloth Button-down. Color: blue, the only color that matters. The perfect shirt, appropriate for any occasion, somehow perfectly sized for my arm length, torso length, progressively expanding abdomen. The perfect meridian of dressiness. Whenever I wear a different shirt, at some point in the day I regret not simply wearing the Polo. 

Icees. As a kid I used to get these all the time. I would get them at the tote-sum, my regional adjective for the convenience store. My wife’s people calls these establishments handy-ways, and routinely cringes at my use of the hickish “tote-sum.” Whatever: it’s the place where the Icee machines lived. I prefer the traditional Coca-Cola–flavored Icee above all else. I don’t go for that blue stuff. And I don’t go for slushies or slurpees or whatever ice-filled liquified candy Sonic is pushing this week. Just a Coke Icee. These days, these days of the expanding man, I only get them when I take a child to see the latest IP iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That cineplex has an Icee machine that actually works — another wrinkle. Growing up, traveling up into the Mississippi Delta to see my ancestors, my parents preferred stopping for a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant called the Pig Stand. They made the best milkshakes, but their milkshake machine was often broken. There is some corollary between the deliciousness of the processed beverage snack treat and the hypochondriac unreliability of the machine that makes it. It’s as if its genius can only manifest every 72 hours. More than once did we stop by the Pig Stand and leave empty bellied. Maybe what was delicious was its own brokenness. Eventually the Pig Stand followed its milkshake machine’s lead and closed permanently, leaving only the bitter aftertaste of nostalgia. Inversely related: the ubiquity of fully functional Smoothie Kings throughout the south correlates to how I find all of their products hopelessly mid. 

Voice Memos. Technology for people who hate technology or are afraid of technology or become so helpless and distracted in the face of options, in the off-chance of dopamine sparks flying. If you give me switches, I am going to flip them in an effort to see what they do and optimize the pleasure of the experience, but then I get so caught up in optimizing the potential pleasure, I never do the original task that I came to do so many moons ago. I am swamped by options. I have 18 tabs open full of articles where I have read two paragraphs each. There is always the potential next best thing if I am not sufficiently trapped or harnessed into the current thing. The voice memo is the perfect recording studio for someone like me: all you can do is record and send it to someone. Perhaps you can edit it? I haven’t figured that part out and please don’t tell me how. It’s linear. It’s got one button. If it sounds bad, you have to do it over. There is no patching available. No punching in. No tracking. I still have a microcassette recorder in my desk, which I used back in college. A great invention. Just enough technology to be useful but not enough technology to be interesting. Put that on a T-shirt. I’ll wear it under my Polo. 

Kolaches. Have you had a kolache?