Category: Humor

The problem with real life is that there are no close-ups. We don’t have camera angles that show us which job we should take, nor key lights that shine on the eyes of the woman we’re supposed to marry. We may lie in bed at night thinking we’ve done pretty well anyway, and that these are the good times in our life, so we’d better appreciate them. But we don’t get a crescendo from a John Williams musical score to tell us when we tip across the best point in life. We’ll look around later to realize that the best time has passed, and we’ll wonder when the hell that happened.

If only Billy Wilder were directing my life, then I’d get some cues about what’s going on. I’d settle for Kevin Smith, or maybe Ron Howard. None of them signed on for the project though, so I have to bumble my way through it.

However, the movies haven’t abandoned me altogether. I’ve watched more movies than most people have eaten sandwiches, and I’ve absorbed quite a lot of life lessons from films. This afternoon I reclined in front of the fire to gather my thoughts, and as I ate a bag of Snyder’s pretzels I documented the nucleus of wisdom that the movies have taught me. I now bring it to you, packaged into seven convenient bundles.

Physics

You can get hit by a car and sprint away unhurt as long as you bounce off the windshield.

Any piece of furniture can stop any bullet, even a couch made of foam rubber and sticks.

You can run around in a burning house for several minutes and be okay as long as you breathe through your shirt sleeve.

If you jump through a glass window, you’ll get three or four tidy cuts rather than a deluge of blood from severed veins and arteries.

Social Conventions

You’ll probably be left at the altar sometime in your life. Your best man or maid of honor will be the one who screws you over.

If you act like a rude, selfish, condescending pig, then the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen will fall in love with you.

It’s okay for a guy to cry, but only if he’s four feet tall and hiking to a volcano.

Biology

You can get away from any predator by climbing a tree.

Even thugs and homeless people have perfect teeth and are better-looking than anyone you know personally.

A dying person will always be able to say some final words before he expires.

Demographics

There are tons of disgraced ex-cops on the streets, but if you have a ten-minute firefight with explosions in downtown, no cops will show up. Also there are more hit men in the world than there are convenience stores.

Half the people in the world have super powers or vast wealth. Another fourth are wizards, hobbits, elves, vampires, or zombie-fighters. The rest of them are pirates, secret agents, or Russell Crowe.

Morality

Bad people are such awful shots they can fire a thousand rounds without hitting anything. A good person can lean out a sports car window with a pistol and hit a moving target a hundred yards away.

All governmental agencies and corporations are evil, and any of them can be thwarted by a single ex-CIA agent or sniper with a three-day beard.

General Probability

You’re more likely to switch bodies with someone or go back to a younger version of yourself than you are to be seriously injured when your car flips half a dozen times.

Helicopters will be shot down by small arms fire 100% of the time.

If you’re someone’s best friend, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be dead soon. If you’re someone’s mentor, you’re definitely about to die.

Practical Advice

Stay away from telephones, unidentified video tapes, saws, and rings. Just stay away.

When someone asks if you’re a god, say yes. When someone asks if you’re alone in the house, say no.

What invaluable lessons have the movies taught you?

In Jailhouse Rock Elvis Presley taught me that prison isn't so bad if you can sing in a rock and roll band, everyone treats you like a movie star, and pretty girls fall in love with you.
In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis Presley taught me that prison isn’t so bad if you can sing in a rock and roll band, everyone treats you like a movie star, and pretty girls fall in love with you.

Like so many people today, I will soon be looking for a job. I haven’t hunted a job since before Y2K. For young people, that was midnight January 1, 2000, when we all expected airplanes to fall out of the sky and every single machine in every hospital in the world to stop working at midnight. Anyway, it was a long time ago, and my job pursuit skills have atrophied.

It doesn’t help that my main professional skills are being sarcastic, predicting disaster, and drinking Diet Coke all day. Oh, and saying, “No.” I can say no to orphans and puppies and people who want us to do stupid stuff for free. I have no problem with that.

Now that I’m sneaking back into the job market, I have to deal with one of the dumbest things humans ever invented—the resume. I understand its theoretical purpose. I’ve read hundreds of resumes. If I want to hire someone, I can’t talk to every person who applies for the job. I have to weed them out somehow. Thus, they send resumes, and I interview the ones who sent me a cool resume.

I’m sure you see the flaw here. I don’t necessarily interview the people who would be good at the job. I interview the people who are good at writing resumes. I can’t tell the difference, because the key to a good resume is being accurate in every detail, but presenting things in a way that will make your future employer want to talk to you more than they want to eat leftover cookies in the break room.

It can confuse things, or even be misleading. To show you what I mean, think about the villain from the Lord of the Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkien. His name is Sauron, and if you’ve never heard of him or read the books, don’t worry about it. Everything I’m about to say makes sense even if you haven’t read Tolkien’s thousand or so pages.

Anyway, let’s just say that at the end of the books Sauron is out of a job. If he still had a material body and wanted to get a new job in corporate America, he’d need a resume. Here’s an example of how a resume coach might take his basic information and craft it into an interview-landing resume.

GOALS – Sauron begins with his career goal.

Career Goal: Dark Lord of a Malevolent Empire Dedicated to Bringing Misery and Destruction to Everyone Everywhere

This is a bit too specific. He’d cast a wider net by generalizing while still being clear about what he wants.

Career Goal: Executive Leadership Position in an Aggressive, Goal-Driven, World-Class Organization

CORE SKILLS – It’s often wise to list your core skills so that they stand out from your work history. Sauron’s skills show a lot of promise. With the exception of a few details, he’s in the sweet spot for a corporate executive position. However, the unvarnished description fails to include the kind of key words that hiring managers look for when plucking good resumes from the mass of mediocre ones. My proposed rewording appears just beneath each core skill.

Core Skills:

  • Plotting the Destruction of All Goodness and Light
    • Long Range Strategic Planning
  • Tyrannizing the Land of Mordor Until It’s the Apotheosis of Depravity and Evil
    • Organizational Transformation
  • Forging Wretched Scum into an Unstoppable Army Capable of Slaughtering All My Enemies
    • Workforce Planning and Development
  • Imbuing Undead Monsters With the Powers of Sorcery
    • Professional Growth of High-Potential Employees
  • Crafting Magical Rings With Which to Enslave Inferior Creatures
    • Innovative Product Development
  • Showing No Mercy
    • Aggressive Negotiation

WORK HISTORY – Work history can be a tricky area. Fortunately, Sauron was a high achiever. The strict details of Sauron’s most recent jobs show strong capabilities, but companies need to see how those capabilities relate to their organizational challenges. A slight re-casting is in order.

Dark Lord of Mordor, 2942 through the End of the Third Age

  • Fortified Mordor into a virtually impregnable stronghold
    • Identified and mitigated the organization’s strategic vulnerabilities
  • Fielded mighty armies of foul creatures
    • Mobilized a multi-national workforce to execute company directives
  • Killed thousands upon thousands of pathetic humans
    • Carried out a successful campaign to deny competitors critical resources
  • Subjugated various ghastly tribes
    • Executed hostile takeovers of smaller organizations with complementary capabilities
  • Poisoned the minds of arrogant sorcerers and kings
    • Led a successful disinformation and PR campaign against key competitors

Necromancer of Dol Guldur, 1050 – 2942

  • Brought undead monsters back into existence
    • Recruited key personnel critical to future organizational success
  • Destroyed the city of Minas Ithil
    • Achieved 100% market share in an important geographical area
  • Remained undetected by wizards for almost 800 years
    • Implemented a successful corporate counter-espionage program
  • Escaped to Mordor as planned when attacked by nosy wizards and elves
    • Developed a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that ensured uninterrupted operations when an actual disaster occurred

WORK HISTORY CHALLENGES – Now Sauron reaches one of the most difficult problems in resume writing—how to deal with a gap in employment history. This doesn’t show the kind of drive that a corporate employer is looking for, and a little spin is required here.

Shapeless and Dormant Evil, Beginning of Third Age – 1050

  • Floated insubstantial while followers continued to perpetrate evil in the name of Sauron
    • Volunteered without compensation to provide inspiration and moral support to those advancing industry goals

LENGTHY WORK HISTORY – When a job-seeker has a long work history it’s a bad idea to show every job in detail. Since Sauron has existed since the beginning of time, his work history is longer than most. An abbreviated explanation of his prior work is still a little too specific, so generalization is in order.

Mighty and Powerful Lord of Evil, First Age and Second Age

  • Titles included “The Dread Abomination,” “The Abhorred,” “The Nameless Enemy,” “Ring Maker,” and “Base Master of Treachery.”
    • Worked in various positions of increasing responsibility
  • Notable achievements included:  
    • Served as lieutenant to the world’s ultimate evil being  
      • Served as second-in-command to the chief executive of the industry-leading organization
    • Served and then betrayed the gods  
      • Secured intellectual property and then spun off into an independent operation  
    • Created the Rings of Power
      • Developed unique and market-changing products

I won’t go on with Education, Special Awards, Publications, and so forth. You get the idea.

So as I sit down to write my resume, I’ll keep all this in mind. If it’s possible to create a compelling resume for The Dread Abomination, it should be possible to create one for a sarcastic, soda-swilling doomsayer. Who’s good at saying no.

Sauron at the company party. He looks about as comfortable as everybody else.

Photo from B.S. Lambalgen – http://juima.org

Now that Christmas over and everybody’s holiday cheer has been poisoned by bitter relatives and travel reminiscent of a bad peyote trip, I’d like to talk about all things Yule. I’ll hurry, since I ought to be editing right now.

I rate this Christmas as bizarre.  It was far stranger than the one at which every child in my extended family had the flu, and Christmas morning found them lying scattered around the couches and rugs like victims of a grenade attack. One of them would lift his head an inch and flop it sideways to look at a new toy before collapsing back onto a pillow, and another might barf on a poinsettia, but they whimpered at the suggestion they go back to bed.

This Christmas was more peculiar than that. It was the first one without my mom, and Christmas without my mom is like the circus without monkeys. She loved Christmas more than any person I’ve ever met, so without her the festivity index was low. Also, we gathered a couple of days before Christmas, which seemed odd, but as far as my father is concerned Christmas Day is now no more significant than August 7.

But I don’t want to talk about all that.

I spent much of Christmas Eve fixing my in-law’s wireless network, which was more festive than it might sound, once everyone went away and stopped talking to me. I love them all, but my brain does one thing at a time, and answering questions counts as one thing. It occasionally appeared that I might fail, and comments about the need for bigger brains were overheard, but at last, on Christmas morning, I drove a victorious stake through the son of a bitch’s heart in the spirit of the season.

But I don’t want to talk about that either.

I want to talk about coconuts.

When I was a boy, my father always bought a coconut and put it under our Christmas tree. He never explained it. I never asked. Why would I ask? You have tinsel, you have gifts, you have a coconut. It’s the way things were done. On Christmas morning, once the gifts had been opened in turn so we could all appreciate every revelation, my father smashed open the coconut with a 22-ounce framing hammer. Then he drank the milk and ate most of the meat, since the rest of us didn’t care much for coconut. I think my mom ate a little for the sake of politeness.

When I grew up and started talking to my friends about holidays, I realized that not a single one of them had a coconut burrowing under his Christmas tree. My family was unique. I asked my father, hey, what’s with the coconut? He said he had no idea. In his childhood, whenever his family could afford a coconut, they had a coconut. He guessed it was a family tradition, like cooking ham at Easter, or following young men who leave town after trifling with their daughters and then quietly murdering them.

This puzzles me a lot. Five generations ago my people were hanging around North Texas, felling timber and farming and making trouble. They’d have to ride a horse two weeks to find the closest coconut trees. Getting a coconut must have been a significant effort. Catching a bobcat and strapping it to the floor under the tree would have been a lot easier.

I turned to my friend and mentor, Google, who guided me through a lot of Christmas coconut cakes, Christmas coconut cookies, and Christmas coconut balls before I found I’m not the only child of the coconut tradition. At least two other people in the world grew up with coconuts in cozy nests under their trees—and neither of them has a shade of an idea where this behavior came from or what it means.

I could create a crackerjack story about the Christmas coconut tradition. No one seems to know a damn thing about it, so who could say I’m wrong?

The coconut represents the sacred heart of Huldah, the cow in the manger that stepped on the second wise man’s foot, causing him to spill some frankincense, and whose heart shrank in contrition, and who afterwards gave vodka instead of milk on the Sabbath. So we put a coconut under the tree to remember her. And then we smash it and hope there’s vodka in it.

It’s tradition. Don’t mess with it.

Don’t strap this little dude down under your cheery Christmas tree–adopt the coconut tradition instead.

Photo by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble)

Released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License

The biggest problem I have with death is that there aren’t enough laughs. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t find death itself particularly amusing. I have lost some people quite dear to me, which was painful—and which still delivers the occasional icicle to the heart, even after a lot of years.

The silly thing isn’t death, but rather how we think and talk about death. And especially how we behave because of death. For example, look at what I said a moment ago: “I have lost some people…” It’s as if we were at the mall and they wandered over to Taco Bell without telling me, or as if they unobtrusively slipped between the couch cushions. No—they died.

Now I’m perfectly aware that our euphemisms about death are really armor against the grief of loss. If your friend Charlie died yesterday and you’re a reasonably sensitive person, you might tell his other friends, “Charlie passed away suddenly last night,” rather than, “Charlie’s dead. Dibs on his plasma TV.”

Of course, if Charlie drank enough tequila to strike the entire populace of Juarez blind, swam naked in a public fountain, and choked to death on a quarter tossed in by a little girl wishing for her very own collagen lip injections, then no euphemisms are necessary. I defy anyone to hear that truth and not giggle.

When grief is new and armed with claws and spines and scorpion tails, it makes sense to look at death only from the corner of your eye. But after a time—maybe years—the grief loses its killer instinct. Yet even then we often maintain the soft sell when talking about death.

And is that the wisest thing? It diminishes the honesty with which we remember how our loved one’s life ended—and by extension their life in general. Whether or not we like it, a person’s death is an important part of their life, and shying away from their death makes it tough to fully appreciate them.

I recognize that looking frankly at the death of someone you love and accepting that loss is a cast iron bitch. And there are different kinds of loss associated with it, such as the loss of things we spent time doing together:

“We’ll never again hang out at Wal-Mart propositioning strangers and get thrown in jail with guys named Lug-nut and Iguana Bob.”

There’s the loss of the things you shared:

“We won’t ever sit around again arguing over whether Kirk or Picard is the best starship captain.” (I’m a Kirk fan because he doesn’t have meetings and sweet talk the bad guys. He SHOOTS the god damn aliens with his phaser and then screws their women.)

And there’s the loss of how you felt:

“He was my friend, and he never made me feel like a creepy old fart for wanting beautiful young women to want me.”

Obviously that was all a bit facetious. But hey, a little humor at the expense of the Grim Reaper isn’t amiss. Anybody who wears that much black in the day time has got to be a pretentious asshole.

When someone I love has died then a part of me indeed died too—the part of me that could only exist when I was with them, that was brought into being because of them, and that has now vanished forever because they will never come back. When I grieve for the loss of someone I love, I am also grieving for the part of me that they brought to life—and that they killed by dying themselves.

And when that happens, you sure as hell better laugh all you can.

IMG_0827 - For Blog
This photo doesn’t really have much to do with death, but I thought it was neat. Although it was sitting over a dead person in a cemetery, so I guess it has something to do with death. Heck, I’ll use it anyway. Some days death can just kiss our asses.

I’m thinking about murdering some flying cows. It wouldn’t be hard, at least on the technical side. They’re cows, so they’d just stand there and take it, or maybe they’d chew their cuds and hover a little. But I’d struggle on the emotional side, because they have huge brown eyes, and they’re goofy looking, and they make me giggle.

These are fictional cows. I’ve written them into a story I’m working on, which I guess says a lot about the maturity of the story and my maturity as a person. I just love them. The story isn’t about them, and they don’t show up that much, but when I get to write about them I feel giddy. If you’ve never written about flying cows, I suggest you run right out and try it. It’s better than playing golf while you’re high.

And yet, my friend Dan has a great rule about acting. If something makes you giggle for more than 15 seconds, don’t do it. I believe that applies to writing too. If it entertains me that much, it’s almost certain to aggravate and insult a lot of other people who don’t share my sense of humor. A large proportion of the relatively small number of people likely to read my story would despise my flying cows. My cows might be sad. So instead I should shoot them between the eyes with the Delete key.

I’m now trying to talk myself out of writing a eulogy for my cows, since I have a couple of thousand more words to write before I go to bed tonight. Maybe I can just say that like many things in this life, too much good is bad. A slice of cake is good. A barrel of cake frosting is a heart attack. Flowers from an admirer are good, but a gift-wrapped leather sofa containing a hidden webcam is a restraining order. It’s about perspective and proportion.

“Perspective” is not my middle name. My middle name is “It probably won’t kill us, so let’s pour the green stuff into the pink stuff and see what happens.” I sometimes get into trouble because of that, causing me to tell people things that make them never talk to me again, get locked up in remote places, and have parts of my body mashed off. I was walking out of my psychiatrist’s office once (which sounds like the evil twin of a bad joke), and he shocked me by saying, “Let me know if you start feeling too happy. That’s a bad sign.” That was a hell of a note. But it made sense when I thought about it, because being too happy is bad for me, just like too much sex would be. I can’t think of exactly how it would be bad, but I’m sure it would be.

So, I know what I have to do. The road to mental health and literary excellence seems to be paved with the bodies of flying cows, and it’s slaughtering time. I’ll do it after this next chapter. It contains a flying cow chase scene, and they’re just so cute when their ears stand out like wings and their udders flap in the wind.

Cyclone the Flying Cow - She's like Chuck Yeager, if Chuck Yeager were a cow. And a girl.
Cyclone the Flying Cow – She’s like Chuck Yeager, if Chuck Yeager were a cow. And a girl.

Photo from http://www.cumanagement.org/article/view/id/Purple-Skies-and-Flying-Cows

 

 

I’d like to make a few hundred Christmas cookies, but most of the people who might eat them are relocated, dead, or not speaking to me. Instead, yesterday I window shopped for cookie ingredients. Yes, it’s pathetic, but I could be strapping reindeer antlers onto my cats and sucking the rum out of fruitcakes. History shows that I’m not above such things.

I admit that in past years my desire to make cookies sometimes exceeded my will to make cookies. I devoted too much time to other holiday activities like writing Christmas cards and playing World of Warcraft. No choice remained other than slinking to Tom Thumb to score some pre-made cookie dough, as if the Pillsbury Doughboy were a street corner dealer of bootleg holiday cheer. Yesterday, out of nostalgia, I glanced at the cookie dough tubes as I sailed past towards the chocolate chips. I jerked my cart to a halt, and I said, out loud, in the middle of the aisle with toddlers around, “Holy sheep shit from hell.”

This is what I saw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t eat the raw cookie dough. At least they said “please.” I’ve heard rumors that raw dough may not be good for you, but I figured that’s because it clogs your arteries and makes you die, which we all know is a small price for eating cookie dough. I didn’t realize that cookie dough’s perils warranted an actual warning label. Since childhood I’ve eaten a barrel of the stuff, and almost everybody I know has eaten it too. I’ve never heard of a person who, when provided access to raw dough, didn’t instantly stick some in his mouth.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I decided to go home and find out.

As a member of the ever-evolving species homo sapiens, I employed our latest strategy for responding to life-threatening situations. I went to Google. I “googled” the phrase “raw cookie dough kills you dead.” I got five brazillion hits. (That’s a real number—kind of. Look it up.) I only had time to read two brazillion of them. WebMD, the Centers for Disease Control, the New York Times, and many others agreed—raw cookie dough is horrible. Don’t eat it. While you’re at it, stay out of the cake, brownie, and biscuit mix too. If your mom offers it to you, spit it out.

Here’s the deal. Back in 2009 an e. coli outbreak made 77 people sick. Doctors looked into it and figured out that they all ate cookie dough that must have been contaminated somehow. They ruled out eggs (pasteurized). It couldn’t be the sugar, molasses, baking soda, or margarine (all treated for pathogens). If you’re about to suggest it was the chocolate, shut the hell up right now. It must have been the flour, which is horrible, nasty stuff never treated for deadly substances, even though humans have been eating it for thousands of years. The doctors didn’t uncover hard evidence. There was no smoking flour gun. But by process of elimination, flour must have been the deadly ingredient.

These doctors are called epidemiologists, and they study what makes bunches of people sick and/or die. They probably pegged it when they blamed the flour. I believe them.

With the smooth efficiency of a guided missile cruiser, our medical professionals, our government, and the news media terrified people across the nation by exposing the raw cookie dough threat. Bake the dough before you eat it, or you’re courting death. No exceptions. Well, the raw dough in ice cream is okay. It’s “likely” treated in a way that makes it safe. That’s what the doctor said. “Likely treated.” I’m sure they don’t want to make Ben and Jerry do away with a popular flavor.

I’m going to piss off every person reading this by saying, Let’s Do The Math. Hang in there with me.

How many people eat raw dough? About half of college students eat raw dough. Lots of them buy it just to eat—why cook it? That means about 11 million of them eat raw dough.

How many of them get sick from it? Well, the 2009 outbreak was 77 people, not too big, and that’s based on the whole population of the USA. Let’s be generous and say that lots more students get sick—maybe 1,000 per year. That makes their odds of getting sick about 1 in 11,000.

On the other hand, falling down also hurts a lot people.  Your chance of falling down and hurting yourself badly enough to go to the hospital is about 1 in 40 each year.

But let’s give these students a break—after all, they’re quicker on their feet that an old guy like me. Maybe their chance of getting hurt falling down is only 1 in 100.

That means that these students are about 100 times more likely to get hurt falling down than to get sick from eating raw dough.

So what I want to know is when I’ll see a big story on CNN about the dangers of standing upright, along with some stern warnings about dragging yourself along on your ass everywhere you go so you don’t fall down and die. If you happen to catch that news report, please tweet me.

I hear the objections. Walking around is necessary, while eating raw dough is optional. Well, if you’ve ever gone over to your girlfriend’s house and found your clothes and your laptop scattered across her front yard, you know that eating raw cookie dough is non-optional.

I won’t advocate that you eat raw dough. I can’t. If I do then some slope-browed yokel will eat four jumbo tubes of the stuff and sue me all the way to Armageddon. But I myself am a little tired of giving in to manufactured terror, and if eating sugary globs of dough counts as a blow against cowardice and stupidity, then I’m happy to strike that blow.

Besides, this sets my precedent for the day when doctors say orgasms are bad for you.

I’m fairly sure that Disney is trying to kill me. I don’t mean they plan to wipe me out with an obvious weapon, and they don’t want me to flop over dead in the middle of the Country Bear Jamboree. That would cause talk, and the paperwork would be a bitch. Instead, I think they intend for my heart to explode like a super nova while I’m mowing the yard in about five years.

You see, we’re on the Disney Meal Plan. It’s not just the Disney Meal Plan, mind you. It’s the Disney Deluxe Meal Plan. My wife’s father, who is hosting this trip, graciously and generously furnished this plan, and I’m grateful to him for his kindness. I knew it was something special when we checked into the hotel. The desk clerk looked at our paperwork, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Oh, you’re on the DELUXE Meal Plan,” just as she might say, “Oh, you reserved a UNICORN to carry you around Fantasyland.”

But I still didn’t appreciate what that meant until our first afternoon in the Magic Kingdom when we decided to eat. We inquired at a small restaurant and were told the wait was rather long. In fact, my wife and her traces of blood sugar would have been convulsing on the pavement at Goofy’s feet if we’d waited that long. So we trotted across the street to buy hot dogs.

I ordered two hot dogs and a small Diet Coke, and I gave the nice lady my meal plan card. The nice lady looked annoyed with me. After a couple of minutes of gesturing and shouting over the 50 other orders in progress, she made me understand that if you have a meal plan there is no such thing as a hot dog and a drink. If we wanted to use the meal plan for two hot dogs, we would get two deluxe hot dogs. Mine had chili and cheese. My wife’s came with pulled pork and slaw. Also, small drinks don’t exist for meal plan owners. We’d get large drinks, and two of them. Didn’t we want the French fries? She hoped so, because we were going to get them anyway. Oh, and we’d better not walk out of there without our mandatory two desserts. Stunned, my wife and I shuffled out of the place carrying what looked like a picnic table full of food, with a cellophane-wrapped fudge brownie clutched in my right hand.

We regrouped and changed tactics, like guerillas who’ve just been beaten by superior firepower. From then on we ordered one meal and split it whenever possible. We still ate like bears in spawning season. The breakfast egg sandwich was as big as half a dozen Egg McMuffins. I am not kidding. That worked out okay when we could order standing up. But if the restaurant was more sophisticated than a taco stand in Juarez, it didn’t let us get away with any of this ordering-one-meal-to-split-between-us bullshit. Two people get two meals, plus appetizers, beverages, and desserts. If we suggested otherwise, we got wry looks, as if they thought we might be socialists.

I left some good food on several tables. Things culminated last night at a wonderful restaurant. I nibbled on my appetizer, knowing I had to pace myself for the entree and the dessert. I’d ordered pastitsio, sort of a Greek lasagna, even though the waitress warned me that it was “heavy.” It arrived in a bowl as big as my face and three inches deep. I now know that in Greek “heavy” means nine macaroni noodles, a shred of ground beef, and four pounds of béchamel sauce.

I began digging through the pastitsio, looking for something other than that mass of butter and milk with the same specific gravity as uranium. I started to think of this meal as arsenic injected directly into my heart muscle.

As an aside, throughout my struggle with this entree, the wait staff was several times forced into frivolous birthday singing and shouting for embarrassed diners. My god, why don’t restaurants allow their servers to retain some dignity? They should just comp the birthday boys and girls a martini and a lottery ticket. Maybe a hooker if you ordered the lobster.

My wife, her step-mother, and I all surrendered to our monolithic tubs of pastitsio after several minutes of unsuccessful excavation. The wreckage looked like this:

I almost rebelled and refused dessert, just to challenge the restaurant into reprisals. My courage failed, and I ordered chocolate cake. How could they screw up chocolate cake? The waitress soon brought me an unfrosted disc of cake, the size, shape, and color of a hockey puck, with a little raspberry sorbet on the side. After one bite I realized this wasn’t the Nestle’s chocolate you might use for Christmas cookies. This chocolate was made from cacao beans picked under a full moon by virgins with hands bathed in lotus nectar. If my wife had reached for a bite I might have slapped her hand. If she’d known what I had on my plate, she’d have jammed her dessert fork into my jugular and let my body puddle to the floor while she annexed my cake.

That cake made up for everything. Here’s how it looked:

We’ve fought hard to keep the Disney Deluxe Meal Plan from killing us at some future time, but I fear we’ve failed. I may die from a butter-fueled coronary in a few years, courtesy of a mouse in a giant, sweaty costume, but that’s okay. It’s all part of the magic.

By the way, this is what they say the magic looks like:

This is what the magic really looks like:

At Disney World, if you don’t glitter then you’re a drone. You can push strollers, pay for ice cream, block the paths with your chubby waddle, and fill up queues to make it hard for the real merry makers to get to the Haunted Mansion. But you don’t add to the corona of happiness enfolding the place, and you’re just no fun. Today I saw a man who would kill you just for blinking, but in Fantasyland he strutted around wearing a red sequined Dumbo hat, complete with tail and ears that light up. That guy was fun.

I’ve seen more little girls dressed as princesses than I’ve seen Jack Sparrow t-shirts and coffee mugs. They were cuter than these kittens:

The little Scottish princess from Brave was popular, as you can see:

My favorite tiny princess wore a shiny lavender fairy tale dress and sparkly shoes, and her hair was done up with glitter and other girly doo dads. She was in the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop with a hook on her hand, wrecking everything on the shelves and threatening anyone less scurvy than herself. That princess was pretty, but she didn’t take any shit. My kind of girl.

What did I wear on my journey through the Magic Kingdom? A plain gray t-shirt, gray trousers, and sneakers that I think were black five years ago. I looked like a piece of lint. I was useful for buying hot dogs and saying, “Excuse me,” to people blocking our path to the Hall of Presidents. Apart from that, I was the black hole where merriment goes to die.

I did make a tiny effort to increase the overall tonnage of fun in the park. As we hustled through Frontierland, we heard joyful, terrified shrieks distorted by distance and the Doppler effect. My wife, who’s more afraid of roller coasters than a bottle of gin is afraid of Keith Richards, said, “You can go ride that if you want to. I’ll hold your glasses.”

“Come on. Am I not man enough to make you feel safe?” I said.

“I don’t think so, unless you can reach in and make my gut feel safe.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Maybe I can be the gut whisperer.”

That was not a popular response. Twenty minutes later I was watching robot Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address. There was very little screaming involved.

Oh, and by the way, I don’t think Disney knows that Christmas even exists. You can tell from this picture.

 

 

 

 

 

We have returned to the scene of my wife’s childhood psychological violation.  Many people can empathize, but not many can understand it on a visceral level. I know I can’t. All I can do is hold her hand while she’s drawn through an inexorable maelstrom of insane colors and noise.

We’re riding the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.

She handled it magnificently, considering the trauma she experienced as a little girl. Back then, her parents and brother boarded the big, dumpy boat with her, along with a dozen strangers, and they eddied into the plaster tunnel at bayou speeds. The little cosmopolitan robots were cute, and the song was perky. It was tingly fun for a little girl. It looked a lot like this:

Then the ride broke down, somewhere in Scandinavia. The polite Disney cast members assured everyone that they were safe, things were under control, and the ride would resume soon. Ten minutes later everyone was fidgeting and bickering. Someone asked if the music could be turned off, since each section of the ride plays just a small part of the song over and over. In ten minutes the words “…that is time we’re aware, it’s a small world after all…” had been sung by chirpy kids without stopping about 120 times. No, they couldn’t turn the song off.

Thirty minutes after the breakdown, the arguing and muttered threats began. An emergency exit stood no more than ten feet from the boat, which was now stinking of frustration and fear. Couldn’t the cast members let the guests leave by that door? It’s only ten god damn feet away, for cripe’s sake! No, they couldn’t let the guests out. It wasn’t safe. The guests implied that it wasn’t safe to keep them in the boat listening to this relentless gush of sugary crap, if you know what I mean. A security guard made himself evident a few minutes later.

An hour after the malfunction, the weaker specimens had broken. Whimpers crawled up from the floor of the boat as children clutched their parent’s trendy bell bottoms or hairy legs. The kids who clung to their faculties learned a lot of bad words listening to the adults. They also heard about a lot of creative techniques for killing shitty little high school dropouts drunk on their own pathetic power.

When the eight infuriating, sanity-shredding bars of “It’s a Small World” had played about 1,000 times, the boat jerked, clanked, and slogged forward. The guests exited the ride like G.I.s wading out of a stream in the Mekong Delta. Thanks a hell of a lot, Mickey.

Today my wife drove a spike through the chest of the “It’s a Small World” ride. She sat tall, gazed at the horrible, wiggling ambassadors of world peace, and even laughed at the llama with the giant teeth. I consider it a mighty accomplishment on this, our first day at the Happiest Place on Earth.

And yet, in the seat behind us a little girl moaned, much like a distressed elk, “Out… out… out… ” Her mother soothed her and comforted her and promised that it would all be over soon. Nothing eased this child’s pain. It was like, you know, the Circle of Life or something.

I’m honored to provide the guest post today at the blog But What Are They Eating? It’s a fun and unique blog owned by Shelley Workinger, author of the SOLID series of novels, which you should check out now. I mean after you read my post, but before you do anything else like checking Facebook or eating those M&Ms in your desk.

But What Are They Eating? contains a regular FoodFic feature that explores how food is used and represented in writing. Shelley asked me to guest on the blog, and I’ve written Is “Kumquat” The Funniest Word In The English Language? about how food is used in my humor book Bring Us The Head of the Velveteen Rabbit. I’m thrilled to have been asked to participate, and please read the great posts in Shelley’s blog, and not just my post. Mine may or may not be great, but it’s probably the only post in FoodFic that’s ever contained the words “trowel” and “mammoth.”

So, please check out Is “Kumquat” The Funniest Word In The English Language?

Thank you, Shelley!

Also, since no one on the planet actually knows what a kumquat looks like, here’s a picture in which kumquats appear. Just doing my part for food appreciation.

Can you spot the kumquats in this picture? Hint: they look less appetizing than anything else, including the plate.

Photo by jules: stonesoup

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.