You know how there’s that expression in sports where they say, he made the hard play look easy? And contrarily, he made the easy play look hard? Well, it’s the latter I’m talking about here, relating to myself not in athletics, however, but in everyday mundane tasks. Not tasks, per se, but decisions that need to be made. Everyday mundane decisions. Not the big decisions like, should I sell my pontoon boat or should I purchase round-trip airline tickets to Beijing, China, or should I shift all my assets from mutual funds to T-bills. No. I’m talking a situation, in this case, where I found myself at WalMart in search of a power strip. The kind that you can plug lots of things into, usually electronic equipment.

So I had got about three to choose from, and I had to decide which was the best value – that is, which would yield the lowest cost to benefit ratio. Right off the bat I narrowed the field to two, because I had my mind set on a perpendicular orientation, in terms of how the slots were arranged, the rationale being that such a layout would better accommodate those big, blocky plugs associated with some computer peripherals, for example.

The one I purchased, incidentally – I know I’m going roundabout a little here – I’m just trying to impart as much information as possible so you can judge for yourself whether I made a good decision. Well, that would be hard to do, wouldn’t it? Since we may not know for some months or even years whether this product fails in one or more key areas of competency. So you should simply judge whether you think this was a hard decision, as I’ve purported, or an easy decision. But you don’t have all the facts yet! Furthermore, I haven’t even begun to speculate about the numerous unfortunate side effects that might result from an eventual product failure, including but not limited to my own mortal demise! Or, at the very least, a set of misadventures that would prove quite inconvenient indeed.

Again – well, not again, I think I mentioned this in another rambling essay some time ago – this is a spawning of contingencies and contingency trees, which I think about often, to my own detriment. I mean, take a guy like this guy I work with. We’ll call him “Cornbread” because his name is just about the opposite of cornbread. Cornbread is the assistant to the Vice President of the division. He’s more or less an office manager, keeps things running smoothly, deals with faulty copy machines and sends out e-mails concerning birthday cake and so forth. This is a guy – very affable guy, incredibly affable. I don’t know if I would call him … what is that word that means … he’s almost … not fawning but … what is that word? Affability to the point of … not pandering but … he’s just trying too hard sometimes. Obsequious! He’s not obsequious. Just forget it.

This is a guy, black guy, maybe late forties, divorced I believe … second marriage? I’m not sure. My point about Cornbread is that I think he would make a one-second assessment of the power strip situation and make a clean decision, without second guessing, remorse or contingency speculation and go about his life. Maybe I’m wrong about Cornbread. In fact, I probably am. Fuck me!

The goddamned point is that there’s some enviable bozo out there who would be capable of making this an easy decision. Easy-peasy-Japaneasy, just like that, on with life. You dig? Is this you? I envy you, then. Maybe you have one criterion like price, which serves as a proverbial railroad switch for all your purchases. Or packaging. It’s all about packaging nowadays, the sizzle not the steak, eh? And so really there are many different categories of people – I’m wrong for trying to divide everyone into two groups, an easy and a hard, because as per usual there are myriads upon myriads of subcategories, just like the contingency tree has so many, many branching branches going every which way but loose. In the case of the power strip, maybe there’s someone who would choose solely based on the dollar value of the equipment protection guarantee. This factored into my decision, although it was but one of many factors. Oh Jesus, I’m boring myself to death …