Category: Life

People are awful, and that’s the way I like them. Whenever some spiteful squid of a person tells me about another fellow’s terrible behavior, I just smile. I smile because despite his abominable acts, that fellow still has people who love him and a place to sleep and better taste in clothes than I will ever have. And that makes me happy, because I have certainly done things as bad or worse than any of the nasty crap he’s done. He and I may not have been punished as we deserve, because the world is not fair. Then again, if we all got what we deserved, it would be a mighty sad world.

I like people so much that I watch them a lot, in what I hope is a non-creepy way. They are more entertaining than any blockbuster movie in the past 50 years. They’re more fun than a Wii, that’s for damn sure. Even when I can kind of start predicting what they’ll do, the way they do it still gushes charm. And people never enthrall me more than when they somehow, mystically, figure out how to act around one another without ever talking about the rules, or really saying anything at all about it.

You may feel that I’m now communicating to you in ancient Babylonian, or in the language of crayfish, because my words make no sense. I will produce an example for you. When you walk into an elevator that has people in it, you know there are certain rules for behaving in there that don’t apply anywhere else. For example, in an elevator you must move as far as possible away from anyone you don’t know. If someone gets off the elevator, you have to readjust like those B-Bs in those stupid games so that everyone can move farther away using the newly freed space. No one ever told you to move the hell away from those people. No one handed you a rule book for riding elevators. But you, and every other elevator-riding human, know how to behave.

I’ve never just ridden the elevator all day to enjoy this phenomenon, because I’m not a sociopathic freak, or at least I’m not one yet. But I have wandered around looking for similar behaviors, and I didn’t have to wander far. If you look carefully, you’ll see that when I check out at the grocery store the whole process is choreographed like Swan Lake. I stand in line, which is nothing special—I do that lots of places. While waiting, I snatch looks at trashy newspapers and Baby Ruth bars and magazine covers showing women with breasts bigger than their heads. But I try to pretend that I’m not actually looking at them—that I’m really passing the time checking out the carpet cleaning machines and the Pepsi display shaped like a football helmet. As if anyone would care.

Then when the person ahead of me is unloading his cart, it’s okay to pay surreptitious attention to what he’s buying. I may think, Ooh, marshmallows, cinnamon gelato, and Cocoa Puffs. I see someone’s getting back in shape. But I make sure not to look like I’m reconnoitering his groceries. And for God’s sake, I would never make any sort of comment about them, even if he were buying Crisco and syringes so he could shoot up lard.

If the guy in line ahead of me asks for three price verifications on a can of Pringles, then writes a two party, out of state check, I’ll get mad. I’ll grumble, and I’ll roll my eyes at the shopper behind me. But I won’t kick the moron in the shin, raise my voice, or even say anything to him. When the moron is at last in the parking lot, then we can all bitch him out and enjoy doing it, but we can’t do it to his face.

When it’s my turn to check out, I must follow a protocol. What do you think would happen if I just walked up and handed the cashier a fist full of money before he scanned my items? What if I nudged the cashier out of the way and tried to scan my items myself? What if I tried to pay with 10,000 pennies, or with a gold watch? What would happen if I asked the cashier for his autograph? These things aren’t as outlandish as you might think. Someone from another culture might not know they’re wrong. But I know all about these things, even though I have never taken a class on grocery checkout etiquette. I just absorbed the social conventions over the hundreds of times I bought bananas and cup cakes.

This all makes grocery shopping sound a lot more exhausting than it really is. But in fact, the conventions smooth out the whole experience so that you don’t have to think as much. You don’t have to wonder what the heck to do when the credit card scanner starts blinking at you like a lemur in the daylight.

It would be nice to have such strong social conventions in other situations, such as buying an over-priced television, farting in a job interview, and trying to get a table in a restaurant that’s far too classy for you. I think we can take care of this. The other awful people and I will get right on creating those social conventions for everybody. It beats breaking out of court houses, starting bar fights, and yelling in church at mean, old religious ladies.

I think that a Rolex watch is a foolish thing to own, so I guess it says something that I own one. In my defense, I didn’t buy it. Some nice people gave it to me as a gesture of appreciation. But now I own it, and I have to figure out the proper way to use it. I can’t bring myself to slap the thing on every morning and wear it to the gas station and Tom Thumb and the donut shop. That seems massively ostentatious, right? But I don’t want to wait until that date where I try to seduce some exotic, European babe and assume that flashing the Rolex at the critical moment will clinch the deal.

Over time I’ve figured out that the only way I can use my Rolex is to distract people while in the process of intimidating them. I know that sounds stupid as hell. It sounds stupid as hell to me. In fact, I was shocked and a little horrified when I discovered that my Rolex can be used in this manner. But it seems to work.

I have to be wearing my intimidation suit to properly employ the Rolex. If I’m wearing jeans and my Hoops and YoYo t-shirt, intimidation is pretty much out of the question. But I will put the intimidation suit on when I anticipate I’ll need to intimidate someone. It works equally well on surly mechanics and corporate executives. This also sounds stupid, I know. But it works as well as an alligator chained to my wrist. My intimidation suit is a non-flashy gray suit, light gray shirt, and plain tie running from light gray at the top to black at the bottom, plus some expensive Italian shoes. Who the hell knows why this works? I do know that a pop of color, like a Jerry Garcia tie, makes you seem human. And if you wear all black, then people think you’re from a bad gangster TV show and ignore you. Maybe this gray get-up says, “I’m not trying to make an impression on you, so you’d better be impressed by the fact that I’m not fucking around.” I just have no idea.

This morning I put on my intimidation suit and my Rolex. My mom broke her femur a month ago. Her femur, like the rest of her, is 75 years old. It broke kind of like a handful of dry spaghetti. So her past month has been hospital, surgery, hospital, rehabilitation center, nursing facility, home like a god damn moron, same hospital, different nursing facility. The place she’s at now is far nicer than most of the places I’ve lived. It has a phalanx of nurses, hot and cold running physical therapy, breakfast areas, reading nooks, wireless internet, a hair salon, and a damned player piano in the lobby. My mom of course refers to it as a “place of horrors.”

Despite the grandeur of the amenities, I had some insurance questions to ask on my mom’s behalf. I needed the answers pretty quickly. I was there last Thursday, so I went to the receptionist and said, “Hi, who can answer some insurance questions for me?” She said that the Business Director was out, but she’d pass on a message and the Business Director would call me back. No sweat. As the receptionist bent over the message book, revealing her Brown #7 dyed hair pulled into a bun tighter than my rectum, I began spelling out my name for her. She broke in, “There is no need to spell it. I am an excellent speller.”

Well, my name has often been mangled, but what the heck. It looked like she was getting it right, and we were all friendly. Hell, the piano was playing Rachmaninoff in the background, so who could get upset? She proceeded to explain how to properly underline the small “C” in my last name, evidently assuming that I needed help writing my own name. She began to remind me of my worst English teachers crushed together into a size 16 rectangle with arms and a head bolted on. But, I was being nice, so I thanked her and left.

Yes, I received no call that day.

I called back the next day, and I again spoke to Frankenstein’s English Teacher. I asked for the Business Director, and she told me that said person was on vacation that day. This was the second day of my efforts, and I was being nice. I politely asked whether anyone else in the building knew enough about insurance to help me. She told me, in an equally polite tone, that she’d pass the message on to someone else in the office.

You guessed it, no call that day. I called in the afternoon, and Frankenstein’s English Teacher told me that everyone was in the staff meeting, but she’d pass on the message. An hour later I called back, and Frankenstein’s English Teacher told me everyone had gone home, and that no one from the Business Office would be there on the weekend, but they’d be back Monday and she’d pass on the message. I refrained from saying that clearly no one from the Business Office was there on business days either.

Clearly I needed to change tactics. I needed the intimidation suit.

This morning at 9:00 am I was standing at the reception desk, clad in the intimidation suit and sporting my Rolex. In my most business-like, cordial, and “you should in no way consider me your friend” manner, I asked for the Business Director. Frankenstein’s English Teacher looked at me with doubt and asked who I was. This is common when wearing the intimidation suit. People think you’re there to audit them, or sue them, or maybe give them an unpleasant medical examination.  I explained who I was, and she relaxed, telling me that everyone was in the staff meeting. It would end at 9:30 and she’d pass my message on to the Business Director. I said that would be fine, and I thanked her in the tone that a lion would use to thank a wildebeest for wandering around on the veldt.

You may wonder why I wasn’t yet actively intimidating, or maybe screaming and throwing things. That’s a great question. I’ll answer it in a moment.

By 10:00 am I had received no phone call from the Business Director. I asked my mom to excuse me, and I walked to the reception desk. I picked up speed as I got closer, so that by the time I arrived my Italian shoes sounded like Joe Frazier punching the heavy bag. I interrupted Frankenstein’s English Teacher in the middle of whatever bullshit she was doing and said in a crushed gravel voice, “I’d like to speak to the Business Director.”

She said, “Oh, she’s on the phone dealing with a resident issue right now, but I did pass on the message.”

This was the most delicate time in the intimidation process. I had to handle it just right. I had to show that I’d had enough of this shit and wasn’t going to put up with any more. But I also had to show that I was not out of control in any way, so that if I possessed the means to hurt them I would have no problem employing those means with dispassion and efficiency. But most of all, I had to make it evident to them that THEY HAD DONE WRONG.

I leaned on the desk, subtly flashing my Rolex, and raised my voice somewhere between speaking and shouting. I said, “I do not intend to wait for her. I’ve been put off since last Thursday, and I am not happy about it!”

I know that sounds weak. But consider that I was leaning forward and looming above her, I had pulled a moderately furious expression, and my tone of voice sounded the way a shark must sound when its eyes roll back. It was important that I speak no words that were improper in any way, while I put serious threat into my body language and tone.

Frankenstein’s English Teacher’s eyes flicked to my Rolex. I swear they did. She sure as hell didn’t want to look me in the eye, because I was mad and she knew I was mad for a good reason. And if she wasn’t looking at my eyes, she had to look somewhere, and my watch was the sparkliest thing around.

She began explaining and apologizing at the same time. I turned my back to her as she was babbling and stalked away to a chair across the lobby. I sat in the chair, pulled out my phone to check messages, and pretended that she didn’t exist.

Forty-five seconds later she scurried over to me and said the Business Director would be with me in just a minute. Thirty seconds after that she invited me into the back office to meet with the Business Director. As she did so, I smiled at her and thanked her with all the sincerity in my being.

What the fuck? Why did I do that?

I was walking the fine line of intimidation. When people are doing wrong, and they know it, that’s when I have to give them negative feedback. If they don’t know they’re doing wrong, raising my voice and so forth will do no good. But once they start doing what they should do (such as finally letting me speak to the god damn Business Director), that’s when I need to give them positive feedback. Then they’ll want to start doing the things I want them to do.

Is it sneaky? You bet. We’re talking about intimidation here, not the three-legged race with your sweetie on Fourth of July.

The Business Director was a harried young woman sharing a tiny office with two other people. I immediately felt sorry for her. Then I metaphorically slapped myself around and focused on intimidating her. Apparently Frankenstein’s English Teacher had started the job by telling her about me—she looked terrified of me already. So I gave her a business-like smile that promised to smash her into splinters if she disappointed me, and I shook her hand. As we shook, she addressed me by something that was absolutely not my name. This thing and my name didn’t even have any letters in common. I corrected her, and she said that Frankenstein’s English Teacher must have written it down wrong.

“Really? I’m surprised since she’s such an excellent speller,” I said. I couldn’t resist, and the Business Director tried a smile that made her look as if her husband had just bought an emu farm.

Over the next five minutes she answered all my insurance questions. With each answer I became more polite and understanding. By the end of the conversation I had my answers, and we were both smiling and relaxed. I saw her about to stand and get me the hell out of her minuscule space, so I said, “Just a moment. I have a couple of other questions.” I swear to God, she glanced at my watch. Is it an expensive watch? Or is it a cheap knock-off of an expensive watch? As if it matters one damned bit.

I asked her who to talk to about food. I asked who was in charge of medication. I asked about therapy, diet, and transportation. Over the next couple of hours I talked to all of those folks, and I was as nice to them as I could possibly be. They had never done anything wrong by me. They were doing exactly what I wanted—they were talking to me and giving me answers. But I got the sense that they all expected to see me coming. By afternoon, I suspect the people running that facility knew I had been there.

So, this was all great. I got to intimidate, and I got to flash my watch. It was a fantastic distraction from the fact that I didn’t accomplish a fucking thing this morning. My mom’s hardly eaten in a month, she only gets out of bed when threatened, she’s not much stronger now than she was just after her surgery, and the whiny twit doesn’t want to do a damned thing to help herself if it causes her the least discomfort. The doctors and therapists are on the edge of giving up on her. I can intimidate answers out of people all day, and I still won’t have the answer to that problem.

Some people have told me my blog isn’t very personal, but I’m not sure that’s true. A lot of the stuff I’ve posted is about what I think and do and experience. But I admit it’s not too immediate. I don’t tend to write about the fact that there’s a cat lying on 15% of my keyboard right now, misspelling words and opening unneeded menus with her ass. She’s keeping my wrists warm though, which is good because I got up stupid-ass early and it feels cold (yes, even here in Texas).

I don’t know if I’m comfortable with blog-immediacy, because that creates intimacy between me and whoever in the whole damn world runs across this blog and wants to read it. My wife likes to say that she’s an open book–what you see is what you get with her. She also says that if she’s an open book then I’m a closed book with straps that lock, and tiny print inside along with maybe some indecipherable drawings, and arcane symbols on the outside, and a general air of “get out of here, you god damn kids” around the whole thing. I used to be worse, but living with her has loosened me up a bit.

So, I’ll give this a try. Yesterday afternoon I was parallel parking, which I’m good at, while telling my wife a story about work. I don’t tell stories all that well while I’m parallel parking. I thought the story showed my fantastic qualities in my job, under insanely crappy circumstances, and I admit I was selfishly looking for some positive reinforcement. I was like a kid bringing my mom a watercolor that might be a horse or might be a Ferris wheel so she could exclaim how great it was and put it on the refrigerator. The main message of my story ended up being, “I didn’t kill anyone yesterday,” and her quite logical response was, “do you want reinforcement for not doing something illegal?” I need to work on my “pathetic plea for attention” technique.

We’d been invited by some friends to a “contra” dance. This kind of dancing is sort of like square dancing, except there’s a lot of spinning and stomping involved. The dancers behave less like  the cast of Hee Haw, and more like cowboys off the trail in Dodge City, although they laugh more and shoot people in the head less. They were really nice. I’ve danced a pretty long time, so I picked up the steps easily enough. The style was harder for me. I danced like a flamingo who knew all the steps. But the night before I’d been a moron, and as I leaned over the side of the bed to kiss my wife I tried to be cute and ended up hyper-extending my knee. Yes, I’m fairly old.

So I danced one dance, sat one dance, danced one dance, etc. for a while, and I got to waltz with my wife (and we realized we need more practice). Then everybody took a break, so we talked with our friends and had a good time. This was three hours of contra dancing, which is really aerobic and just like getting your heart muscle kicked in the nuts. I wanted to dance some with my wife, but as soon as each dance ended somebody else asked her to dance within the time it takes for light to travel from my right nipple to my left nipple. My wife is a lovely and popular dancer. So I kind of hung back and rested my knee. Occasionally I drank water using a hand that shook to a moderate degree, which is something I’m led to believe I’ll be able to enjoy for many years into the future.

After the dance, we and our friends ate dinner at Chili’s. We chose it for its menu, which provides nearly everyone something they’d like to eat. That really is genius, you know. No wonder the place is always full. I ordered grilled salmon, which was charming and surprising. I’d have expected good grilled salmon at Chili’s just as much as I’d have expected good Beef Wellington at Taco Bell. Just goes to show you. After dinner we went back our house, which was close by. We all sat on the floor in our only room that has no furniture at all, and we played with cats and looked at art books for a while. Two of our friends intended to go back to contra dance for the second three-hour session, which proves that they are tougher men than me. My wife planned to stay home and work a while, so I weaseled another of my friends into going on a mission with me once we dropped the others off.

On the trip back to the Palace of Contra Dance Pain, I called my mom, who is in a rehab hospital. I’d missed visiting her that day  and called to see how she was. She broke her 75 year old femur a month ago, and I’ve been trying pretty hard to help her rehabilitate. Unfortunately, she’s done almost nothing to help herself and thinks that as soon as she gets her cast off everything will be peachy. In the meantime she enjoys whining, groaning, laying in the bed, and looking pathetic. Honestly, she is worse than any 3 year old I have ever seen. I fully believe that she’ll never get out of the bed again and will be dead of pneumonia by Christmas (or shortly thereafter, since people often hang on until after Christmas).

After dropping off our other friends, I revealed the nature of our mission to the friend who was ferrying me around. This was a booze quest. More specifically, this was a quest for the ingredients to make fuzzy navels and pomegranate martinis. The former were for my wife and our friend, and the latter was for myself. I’d had such martinis in restaurant, liked them a whole lot, and wanted to know how to make them myself. I figured it was important to have the ability to make myself these drinks since the majority of my family members are alcoholics. We hit the grocery store for staples such as lemons and pomegranate juice. We laughed a lot about stuff that was really in no way funny. However, I was crestfallen to find that Kroger doesn’t carry a wide selection of pomegranate juice. In fact, they don’t carry any of that shit. They do carry a pomegranate/blueberry juice blend, with some other juices like apple and mango thrown in. My friend was for going to Central Market, but I figured, what the hell, my palate isn’t that sophisticated anyway.

We next hit the liquor store, looking for citrus vodka and peach schnapps. We looked for the cheapest damn liquor we could find, on the shared theory that all of our palates lacked sophistication. There were a few drunks in the store, virtually crawling on the floor to find the cheapest booze on the bottom shelves. I laughed a lot and fit right in, until I realized that my laughter was a little hysterical. I toned it down. We carried our goods to check out, and on the way I picked up shakers that both of us were nearly certain would be ineffective for any task we might ever have. The store closed up about the time we left, which astounded us since it was only 9:00 p.m.

Back at home my wife was wrapping up her work. She organized all her stuff for the next day, since she is the most organized person I have ever met or even heard of. Without her, my life would look like a stagnant bayou floating through variable gravity. My friend watched the digital picture frame in our kitchen, the one I finally set up in July after giving it to my wife for Christmas. Meanwhile, I began mixing drinks. That required an iPhone to reference the measures of ingredients, a knife and cutting board, several measuring spoons, a lemon, an iPad for generally browsing the web to locate miscellaneous information, several bottles of alcohol and juice, a steel chopstick for mixing, glasses, ice, and two useless shakers. As I attacked the drinks, my wife came in to converse with us. This was awkward since I have trouble thinking and talking at the same time. I sort of withdrew from the conversation and didn’t laugh hysterically anymore, which was kind of a relief.

I started with the fuzzy navels. I required about five minutes to make them, which was embarrassing since it turns out they’re easier to make than a glass of Alka-Seltzer. After delivering the fuzzy navels, I started on the pomegranate martini. It had just four ingredients, but it seemed more difficult to mix than a voodoo death potion, including chicken eyeballs. Finally I held half a glass of oddly lavender martini, which tasted pretty damn good to me, although when my wife tasted it she shook her head as if a bug had flown up her nose. Well, it was a bit strong, and I might cut back on the vodka a little when I make it again.

We sat around the dining table and talked for an hour or so. Mainly my wife and our friend talked. I’m a little slow on the trigger in casual conversation, so I didn’t find too many openings I could jump into. Occasionally I said stuff that made sense, but mainly whatever I’d been thinking had been rendered obsolete by the time a large enough break in the action came along for me to slip in. My thinking wandered away now and then, and I nursed my martini. It was nice to hear my wife talk so excitedly. She likes to converse when everyone talks on top of one another, and I was trained that if you did that then bad things would happen to you. Sometimes I don’t make such an energetic conversationalist for her.

After midnight we decided we’d had the required amount of fun, and our friend began packing up her crap. My wife noticed that one of our cats, not the ass-typing cat, was laying around lethargic for the second day in a row. This sucked because she has an enlarged heart, and for a couple of years the vet has told us she might throw a clot and keel over any minute. A couple of months ago the vet examined her and proclaimed her a miracle cat, with a moderately repaired heart. Why did it repair itself? No one has any god damn idea. But since we thought her death sentence had been lifted, this laying around like she was half-dead was concerning. We talked it over and decided to hold off on a trip to the emergency vet until the next morning, just to see if she got any better in the night.

Our friend left with hugs all around. I wandered to the bathroom to slam down my pills that would fly like pin balls through my brain for the rest of the night. I tucked my wife into bed and hung out in the living room for a bit, communing with the ass-typing cat and her friend the whipping-his-tail-into-your-eye cat. I sat a while in the recliner with my laptop, and before I crept to bed I contemplated a foolish Facebook post in which I mentioned the great job I’d done at work the day before, just in case any of my friends wanted to put the watercolor up on their refrigerator.

Miracle Cat
Ass-Typing Cat
Whipping-His-Tail-Into-Your-Eye Cat

I have an addiction, as dirty as they come, and I expect it will destroy me eventually. This addiction writhes at my left hand every day like a surly viper. It lurks behind my desktop computer, to the left of my secondary monitor, in the shadow of my laptop, and beneath my iPad. In that spot I keep a notebook. I mean the kind with dead trees in it. And, God forgive me, a pen. There’s nothing digital about the damn things. They are as analog as a rock.

This wouldn’t be so bad if I just kept them out of some misplaced sentimentality, like my mother keeps her wind-up Victrola phonograph. But I actually take them out and use them where people can see me. When I show up at a meeting, the others sit focused on their laptops, their faces drawing nearer and nearer as if they plan to French kiss the screen. I glance around holding my notebook thinking about all the emails I don’t currently have to answer. When the meeting starts, my buddies attend 10% of it and spend 90% answering emails, checking auctions, and flaming people on Facebook. I attend 50% of the meeting and spend 50% doodling. I’m five times as effective as those guys and a hell of a lot more relaxed. But I know it’s wrong.

Doodling is becoming a lost art, by the way. A person’s doodles reveal a lot about him, and it’s pretty therapeutic. I like cross-hatch doodling myself, but flower doodles, airplane doodles, and penguin doodles each have their charms. If you try to doodle on a laptop though, you just get smudges and odd looks.

I don’t hate technology. I love it. Around my workplace I’m the guy to go to when any of those Microsoft products is kicking your ass. I can make them sing like Beverly Sills. But I can’t get over one thing, despite my shame. Technology is really, really good at doing stuff with ideas once you get them into the document, or spreadsheet, or whatever. But technology sucks at helping you come up with ideas in the first place. I’m a little afraid to say that, in case Microsoft hears me and changes all the keyboard shortcuts just to make me throw myself off a bridge in despair.

I’ll try to explain what I mean. Last week I asked my assistant, Flex, to solve a hard, creative problem for me while I sat around thinking up ways to intimidate people who annoy me. Flex works hard and is a smart young guy, so I felt confident he’d knock this out in an hour or so. I strolled down the hall to see Flex after an hour and said, “Is your solution perfect yet?”

“Almost,” Flex said, although he was thinking so hard his face was wrinkled like a Shar Pei. “I just need to work out a couple of things…”

I leaned over his shoulder and saw a screen full of bullet points so disorganized that each might have come from a different country, or maybe a different reality.

Flex pushed his blond surfer hair out of his eyes and said, “I’m trying to get these dumb boxes to line up and be the same color, and the font looks worse than my prom date.” He squinted and flailed at the mouse like it was a live rodent. “Aw, man! That’s even crappier!”

I sat down beside Flex and leaned over to switch off his monitor’s power. He looked at me as if I’d just given him a lobotomy. I said, “Flex, swear not tell anybody I said this, but the software is in your way. Every time you start thinking about the problem, the software distracts you with details that only it gives a shit about. We don’t care whether the text is red or orange, or whether the font looks like it’s passed through a moose intestine. We just want a good, creative solution. We can address any moose intestine issues later.”

Flex narrowed his eyes and curled his lip at me as much as he could and still seem respectful. I knew what he needed. He needed a hit of the non-digital hard stuff. But I wasn’t sure Flex had ever touched a pen. He might recognize one from an old movie, but then again he might think it was a chopstick.

I stifled a sigh and said, “New assignment, Flex. Tomorrow is my anniversary. Yeah, I’ve been married longer than you’ve been alive, so just shut up. I want you to come up with a love letter for me to give my wife. If you do a good job, you can have the rest of the day off.”

“That’s pretty weird,” Flex said.

“Wait until you’re my age. It’ll seem as tame as ‘See Jane Run.’ Don’t make it sound too romantic. It’s got to sound like an old guy wrote it. You’ve got an hour.” I shoved down the feeling that maybe I’d done something wrong, and I walked back to the Cave of Vengeance and Woe, which is what people call my office.

One hour later Flex poked his head through my office door. He smiled the smile he normally uses when telling me about the latest girl he’d like to sleep with. “Here’s your letter!” he said, and he set his laptop on the corner of my desk. He tossed himself into a chair in that way only fit, young people who’ve never been to the chiropractor can do. The screen read:

  • Significant “I love you” challenge
    –   Previously sounded good
            >   Positive impact on self and others
            >   Extremely high ease of use
            >   Overall satisfaction at highest levels
  • Current “I love you” has diminished in quality
    –   Satisfaction dropping on several dimensions
    –   Root cause of quality problems identified
            >   Partial mitigation achieved, but quality still lacking
    –   “I love you” still operational
            >   Reduced functionality may be acceptable

I leaned back and looked at Flex’s eyes, which were full of mischievous glitter. “You know I like to start with positive feedback,” I said, and Flex nodded. “Well, this is appalling. This is probably the worst love letter in history. I’m sure chimpanzees do better all the time. It’s repugnant to anyone with a brain, and if I were to show it around I think every woman on Earth would want to murder you, and quite rightly so.”

Flex mumbled, “That’s the positive feedback?”

I nodded and said, “Yep. The constructive feedback is that this may be salvageable, and if you want to avoid spending the next three weekends revising labor projections, I’ll give you another chance. I’ll bet you used Powerpoint for this, right?”

Flex nodded.

“I can help you with that,” I said, standing and towering over Flex with the majesty of the Statue of Liberty, if the statue was a little more butch. “Shut off your god damn computer and use this!” I didn’t quite hurl the notebook and pen at Flex, but I think he did get a paper cut on his chin.

He looked like he wanted to question me, or maybe slap me. I stared from my vantage point of confidence and authority that was partly false. I knew I was right, but to the rest of the world I was just a near-extinct organism scratching on stone tablets in the primordial ooze. Then Flex’s shoulders dropped and he stood to drag himself back down the hall. “You have two hours!” I called after him.

Later that day Flex shuffled into my office, and he held out the notebook. He showed all the confidence of a schoolboy handing in a three-page assignment with big letters, lots of spaces, and liberal use of the phrase, “And then the next thing that happened was…” I accepted the notebook and read the page:

My “I love you” is not what it was. It once rang like a polished chime, and yours made a harmony. We split the air, and we laughed at how we sounded, and people smiled when they heard us. I poured myself into the way we sounded, and you held all that music with no strain. No one could convince me that we weren’t the biggest celebration, that I wasn’t the luckiest, that no sound could touch us.

Not what it was. I clash sometimes, and you make sour notes, on occasion. Where is that harmony that felt like the best holiday, that was the most fun, and the one that would last forever? We’ve made music that no one ever makes if they can avoid it, although everyone plays it before the end. It was hard, but at least it wasn’t silence. We held hands and said no to silence. My “I love you” is not what it was, but it’s my chime against the stillness. It rings if you listen hard, and you make a harmony sometimes. We laugh at how we sound, and once in a great while people smile when they hear us.

I looked hard at Flex and said, “Holy shit! This is just what I need. Good job, man!” Flex offered a crust of a smile. “Do you see what you can do when you think about the ideas instead of the software and all its formatting and bullet points and crap?”

He breathed, probably for the first time in two hours, and he gave me a bigger smile. “Yeah, that helped,” he said.

“This will work great,” I said. “Take Friday afternoon off, son. And by the way, where’d you find this? Some romance site? Google+? What? I want to tell my wife where it came from.”

Flex looked surprised and said, “You said write you a letter. Do you mean I could have just copied something off the internet?” Flex turned a little red under his tan. “Well, at least if you do this kind of junk at Christmas I know I can just rip off a song or the Bible or something.”

“You wrote this, Flex? Damn, you’re like the Muhammad Ali of romance.” He stared at me, and I realized he had no idea who Muhammad Ali is. “Take all day Friday off. Back to work for now though.”

Flex grinned at that, and he bounced out of his chair. That’s when I did it. I know it was wrong, but I did it anyway. I said, “Hey, keep writing love letters, and I bet every girl in town will want to sleep with you.”

Flex paused, and then he smiled as if I’d given him a chocolate Corvette full of bourbon and Superbowl tickets. He walked out of the Cave, swaggering a little, and I thought, “That’s right, son, it’s like crack. The first hit is free.”

 

The words of my people are no longer spoken. My people came to this country with nothing a century and a half ago. A century later they had little more than nothing. My people were country people, and they lived on farms. When farming became the same as suicide they moved their families to the cities, and they built roads and painted houses, but they never fully understood that they’d left the country behind.

I knew my people when I was a boy, and they felt pride, and they had no regrets. They raised big families, because that’s what farmers did. Their children raised small families, and their children’s children raised tiny families, or no families at all. The generation of my people who left their farms is now gone, and their children are nearly gone, and the children who remain are no different from the children of any other people. We are not adequate vessels to carry the spirit of my people.

The language of a people defines them. It’s difficult to think of something without naming it. Saying the words makes the thing real to us. The way you say the words declares where you stand in that reality. Many of my people’s words I have never heard elsewhere. They sound strange and crude and backward to modern ears. You may laugh at them, and I guarantee that my people would feel fine about that. My people liked to laugh.

From my earliest memories I recall the phrase Tear up a cast iron jackass. Most of the time it arrived as part of the sentence, “I swear to God, you kids would tear up a cast iron jackass!” You can imagine the kind of thing that prompted this, because I suspect you were a child once yourself. When this phrase appeared, a smart child ceased what he was doing and found a place to hide. My people harbored no doubts about the value of corporal punishment.

On rare occasions my people would say Ain’t been so happy since the pigs ate my little brother. These words appeared when something good happened, such as, “Sears fixed my refrigerator for free. I ain’t been so happy since the pigs ate my little brother.” Clearly this idiom sprang from growing up in large and contentious families. It wasn’t used seriously—all my people of those generations had brothers or sisters who died in childhood. This phrase does say a lot about their understanding of the nature of pigs though.

My people reserved this last phrase for dire situations. This idiom is Makes my ass want to take a dip of snuff. Only extremely unpleasant events warranted this phrase. For example, “I had kidney stones last week. Made my ass want to take a dip of snuff.” I lack even a decent guess about where this phrase came from. Somebody knew about snuff, and clearly they knew enough to say that sticking it in your behind would be unpleasant. But stating that your ass actually desires such a thing is remarkable. My people outdid themselves in this case.

We were a raucous clan, with our own history and way of looking at the world. We’ve become a few cousins who rarely cross paths. One of the last of my people lies dying tonight, and when he goes then one of the last chapters of my people’s story will go with him.

Makes my ass want to take a dip of snuff.

I am a connoisseur of failure. I appreciate failure all across its breadth and depth, from the most innocent gaffe to the catastrophe of shrieking magnificence. Success never tells me who I am. But when I’m crushed by an avalanche of failure, then I can see myself with frigid clarity.

Failure hurts like drinking molten lead. I don’t love it. You’d be crazy to love it. Some people may seek out failure, but nobody loves it. Success is a lot more laughs. You don’t get congratulatory cards for failing to graduate high school, for not making it to your wedding anniversary, or for not getting that big promotion. People tend not to appreciate failure just because it hurts, it’s unpopular, and it sucks.

I feel qualified to speak about failure because I’ve had a lot of it. I dropped out of college like a dope. I pursued a string of one-sided romantic relationships with women who couldn’t distinguish me from a mail box. I got married and then divorced in an impressive 18 months. I lost my business, went bankrupt, and lost my house along with nearly everything else. The year I turned 30 I made less money than I did the year I turned 17. I delivered stage performances that made the audience resemble lizards in a hard freeze. I failed in my efforts to help dozens of family and friends, resulting in everything from having to flush a radiator all the way up to death. Believe me, I know failure.

When people are asked how to fail, they often say something like, “You just screw up.” There’s a certain purity to this answer, but otherwise it’s stupid. In fact, I can fail in six ways. I can fail by setting my goals so obscenely low that even if I reach them I’m still considered a big failure. Or, I can set my goals so staggeringly high that God himself would have to come down and alter the laws of the universe for me to reach them. That guarantees failure for me.

Even if I get my goals right, I can still fail by not paying attention to the details. For example, my car may never reach its destination because it ran out of gas, due to me daydreaming about the Cherry Slushee I want to buy and never looking at the gauge. I can also fail by paying too much attention to the details and forgetting what I’m trying to accomplish. Maybe I drive flawlessly, but I end up at the fabric store, not a promising venue for iced cherry beverages.

Failure is scary, so it may seem odd when I promise you that being terrified of failure is a sure way to fail. Failure is kind of like a horse. If it senses you fear it, it will turn on you, buck you off, chase you, bite you on the arm, and shit on your rose bushes. If I fear failure, I won’t be able to think of anything except failing. Then failure becomes inevitable.

And the last way to fail is to embrace failure. That certainly sounds nuts. But embracing failure is when I try something that I think I can do—maybe—but that I’m not sure I can do. Sometimes I achieve things I didn’t expect. Sometimes I fall straight onto my ass from a moderately great height. But if I’m in the market for failure, I think this is the best buy.

Say that I have walked one of the six paths to failure, and now I have stumbled into a smelly, leech-infested thorn bush of non-success. Now I have the chance to see who I am and what I can learn. But a huge barrier squats between me and all this good knowledge. That barrier consists of four words, and when they come out of my mouth they sound like, “It wasn’t my fault.” Do not misunderstand me. I would adore it if none of my failures was my fault. I’d throw a party. I’ve often claimed that my failures were somebody else’s fault. I was dumb to do that, because when I claim that a failure was not my fault I’m also admitting that there’s not a damned thing I can do to prevent it from happening again. If I had no hand in it happening, then I can’t do anything to fix it. I’ve had to admit that my hideous failures were at least partly my fault, or else I could look forward to them happening again and again until I die.

I despise it when I fail, but I’ve learned to savor failure itself and the happy toys it brings to the failure party. Embracing failure can be particularly sweet, because I’m going out and doing it on purpose instead of stumbling into failure like a toddler in a room full of coffee tables. So I shoot for a little failure occasionally, because now and then it’s nice to see what I look like.

I have decided that Santa Claus can kiss my ass. We once had a warm relationship. He gave me my first bicycle. I helped him build the deck over his back porch. We bitched about global warming together, which is truly creating havoc up at the North Pole. It was all good.

But I’ve realized that with the best of intentions he has helped create a world of “Suits”. I saw someone’s definition of a Suit a while back, and to paraphrase it: a Suit is a person who doesn’t understand that the universe doesn’t give a crap about their opinion on any subject whatsoever.

I am not against gifts and charity. I love generosity and mercy. But my buddy Nick has changed. Once he was fine being the personification of kindness (and a left-handed bribe to hold over kids’ heads). Now he’s a force of nature that fulfills the desires of the deserving.

Sure, he’s led some kids to feel entitled to iPods and computers and cars because they’ve been good, and they want them, and therefore the universe is obligated to provide them. (Not all kids—just the future Suits.) But ooh, the adult Suits! I do not want to get all political, but it seems everybody is concluding that the universe should just make things happen because they want a thing to happen and they’ve been good boys and girls.

You hate something and want it to stop? (Pick anything you care to name… war, high taxes, bad health care, illegal immigration. A Suit’s suit is just as likely to be tie dye as it is to be Armani.) For a Suit, all you need is a righteous stance and a proud ignorance of history, facts, and the forces at work. Really, NOT knowing the facts is a mark of pride for a Suit. The universe should just make it happen in the natural course of events because you’re right, in the same way Santa was supposed to bring you a teddy bear because you were good.

So Santa, you’re fired. I can’t have you hanging around my Christmas anymore. I’m taking over the gift giving for my friends and relatives, and my criterion is that they get presents because I love them, whether they’ve been good or bad, but with the clear understanding that I do not represent the universe in any fashion. I recognize that I do need a holiday icon, since as far as the embodiment of the season goes, I blow. I think I’ll offer the Thanksgiving Turkey the job. He expects everyone to buy their own yams.

Sorry Nick, but it had to be done.

I don’t have too much money, and as a result I’m quite fond of the money I do have. I haven’t named every $20 bill in my wallet. I’m not crazy. But I want my money to be happy, and to feel loved and useful. I like my money to think it’s worth important things like air conditioning and shampoo and ice cream sandwiches. If you let money think it’s only worth lottery tickets and cheap booze, then you end up with sad money.

These days everybody wants their money to take care of them after they retire. I’m no exception. But we probably won’t even find family members who’ll take care of us after we retire, so we’re really saying that we want money that loves us more than our family loves us. That’s a challenge, but then I’ve never punished money for obliterating a FedEx drop box with a car full of drunk 16 year olds at 1:00 a.m. In my car, by the way. Money and I do not have that kind of shared history, so we’re able to start fresh and build on mutual respect.

If my money wants to help set me up so I can eat something besides chicken necks and cardboard when I retire, it will have to grow into more money. It will have to grow into a hell of a lot more money. I admit that my money is ambitious, but damn—it has a huge journey ahead of it. So, like a lot of people I try to help out my money by looking for good ways it can grow.

My money and I have discovered something over the years. A pig has no friends in the sausage factory. Likewise, my money and I have no friends in the financial markets. I’m not saying the financial markets are particularly crooked. It’s just that a lot of people work there, and they like money too. The place they get their money from is, well, me. They don’t have much incentive to see my money get friendly with their money, unless my money goes over to play in their backyard.

Here’s an example. I was driving along with my money and heard a radio commercial for some folks who wanted to sell me gold. I thought that sounded pretty interesting. Gold just sounds cool, like a gold-plated pie server or something. I listened to these folks, and they said they expected gold might triple in value over the next couple of years. I thought to myself, damn, why do you want to sell me your gold then? If you just hang onto that gold you’ll triple your money. What can you invest in that’s going to give you a better return than that? Whatever it is, I want to buy some of that shit. Keep your gold.

Those gold guys are part of the gang that isn’t too interested in my money growing fatter. Otherwise, they would say stuff that makes more sense. But there are all kinds of folks in the markets who sound sensible even though they want to stab me in the armpit with a thousand dollar pen and lead my money into Biblical servitude. I read a while back that the stock market averages a 10% or 11% gain every year. My money and I got excited about that. But real people like me only average about a 2% or 3% gain each year. What the hell? Well, people sell when they’re scared and buy when they’re greedy, and they end up doing those things at lousy times.

There are these fellows in the markets called market makers. They sit in the middle of the trading like spiders dressed in Armani, and they make trades happen. They take a little money for their trouble on every trade. I’ve also got a broker who makes money every time I buy or sell some stock with an ignorant sounding name. So far, so good. These folks deserve to make a living. But if I buy stock in Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and hang onto it for five years, my broker isn’t earning dick, and the market makers aren’t doing any better. So they and their financial market friends regularly tell everybody about the catastrophes around the corner and the unbelievable deals to be had, so that I’ll be trading my ass off chasing them. My returns will drop to nothing, and these guys will gather up my money, even though I doubt they respect and appreciate money like I do. Meanwhile, my remaining money and I will sit drinking shitty tequila while we listen to Freddy Fender and weep.

By the way, you can’t buy stock in Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. It’s now owned by the Unilever corporation, makers of other fine products such as Axe Cologne for Men, and Vaseline.

So what are my money and I going to do? Mutual funds? Real estate? Insurance? Cash in a shoebox in the back of my freezer? Maybe throw myself in front of expensive cars and hope for good settlements? It’s a puzzle. I think we’ll have to address this in an off-site strategic planning session for the board of directors of My Money and Me and Screw Everybody Else, Ltd. I hear that Barbados is nice this time of year.

You can find my money and me here next week.

It’s necessary to understand arson on the Sabbath in order to understand my father.

My father took me to Pete’s Barbershop for my first haircut. Pete owned the largest barbershop in my hometown, with ten chairs, and with mirrors running the length of both walls so you could see yourself into infinity while getting your hair cut. Pete operated a gun store out of the back end of his shop, a logical side-business for any barbershop.

Pete’s entrepreneurial spirit soared above hair and guns. He also served as the town’s only arsonist in residence. If you had money troubles and needed your warehouse or your grain silo burned down for the insurance money, Pete would make that happen for an appropriate fee. He never left enough evidence behind for the fire department or insurance investigators to call it an intentional blaze—Pete was a professional.

At that time my Southern hometown enforced the Blue Laws. These laws prohibited hundreds of items from being sold on Sundays, because Sunday was holy and should be spent it in prayer and contemplation. The Blue Law rules about what couldn’t be sold made lots of sense. For example, you could by a hammer, but you couldn’t buy nails. In moral support of the Blue Laws, all of the barbershops closed on Sundays, except Pete’s. Pete remained open, cut hair, and sold guns on the Sabbath.

Eventually the leading citizens and businessmen worked up a fair amount of outrage about Pete’s improper behavior. They began throwing around talk about boycotts, city ordinances and fines. Then one Sunday night one of the town’s barbershops burned down. The next Sunday another barbershop burned. Local businessmen, especially the barbershop owners, stopped calling for Pete’s to be shut down on Sundays. No one else ever complained about Pete.

All of this happened before I was born, so my father had to tell me this story. I could see that he looked upon Pete’s strategy with approval, and even amusement. But I realized that I didn’t care about Pete. I cared about my father’s approval of Pete, which I recognize to be singular and not an attitude adopted by everyone.

Since the time my father told me about Pete, James Bradley published a popular book called “Flags of Our Fathers.” It concerns the famous photo of the US flag being raised at Iwo Jima, one of the most iconic photos of the last century. The author’s father was one of the six flag-raisers, and the book is about his father and the five Marines who raised the flag. I liked this book. Clint Eastwood even made a movie of it.

Some of my friends enjoyed the book, but they objected to it as well. They said it was sometimes inaccurate in terms of facts and numbers. They pointed out that it seemed unfairly biased against the Japanese. They criticized it for not treating some of the flag-raisers even handedly. These are poor qualities in a history book. I don’t disagree with these criticisms, but I disagree with the conclusion. “Flags of Our Fathers” isn’t a history book, it’s a book about a man’s search for the man his father used to be.

It could seem peculiar to want to know your father before you were born. It sounds like any one of a dozen bad movies. But I know I’ve changed since I was young. Now I have fewer hangovers and more back hair. I keep my mouth shut a lot more, so when I say something stupid the results are far more catastrophic. I know what my own youth looks like, but my father’s youth is an empty place, and there’s nothing a man likes to do more than fill an empty place.

I’ve seen my father work a lot of nights, outsmart executives who thought they were smooth, and design tools to handle strange, pain-in-the-ass problems. He nearly killed a clerk with shock once by giving back money he got by mistake. He crushed a fellow who admired him but who kept making mistakes, and when a stranger close by puked all over himself and the vicinity, my father cleaned the man up. He never told a joke, but he made people laugh. That’s how I’ve known him personally. But of course, it’s only through incidents I’ve been told about that I can know the man he was before I was born.

I do know a lot of the dates and places of my father’s life. But that doesn’t help me understand him, just like knowing the factory and manufacture date won’t help me understand a chainsaw. People do things, and that’s how we know them. My hometown was a rural place when my father was a small boy, but the roads were dangerous enough that his dog kept knocking him into the ditch whenever he tried to walk on the shoulder. His pet raccoon slept in the pocket of an old overcoat hanging on the porch. My five year old father got infuriated when he wasn’t allowed to do what his brothers did, but they were much older—in fact, old enough to fight in the war, and for one of them to die in it.

But the quintessential detail I have from my father’s childhood is of him standing in the kitchen with his dog, and his mother at the stove holding her baby girl. His mother had just refused to let my father do something he wanted to do, and he responded, “If you weren’t holding that baby, I’d throw this dog at you.” Obviously my father was a willful child and not to be trusted, so his parents gave him a .22 rifle and turned him loose in the local woods for the rest of his childhood.

Another war had begun in Korea when my father turned 19, and he thought joining the Marine Corps would be smart. He was a big, strong kid who could hit about anything he shot at, so the Corps slapped a uniform on him, gave him a rifle, and sent him to Korea. My father never told me many light-hearted stories about Korea. He served with the first helicopter unit ever used in combat. That’s less glamorous than it might sound, since his job was to climb down from helicopters on flapping ropes, use axes and explosives to clear a half acre of woods, and watch the damned Navy pilots land those helicopters.

On one occasion, my father’s platoon guarded a small valley, and the Chinese Army decided to send an outrageous number of soldiers through it. Over the next quarter hour the Chinese frothed through the valley killing Marines, who in return killed them in job lots. My father recalled having “the biggest gun that fired the fastest,” and he killed a lot of Chinese kids about his own age. Most were so close he could easily see their faces when he killed them. By the time the Chinese decided that this was a pointless exercise, my father and his sergeant were the only Marines alive. My father told me about this incident with no pride and no pleasure when I was a grown man. In fact, he had blotted out the memory of it and only recalled it 50 years after it happened.

After Korea, my father went to college and played football for a while. Later on one of his friends from college called him for advice. The friend had gotten a job as a P.E. teacher, and he wasn’t sure how to handle his upcoming duties. My father had never taught P.E., but his friend asked his advice anyway. My father told him to “go in the first day, pick out the two toughest guys in the class, and beat the shit out of both of them at the same time.” Then he wouldn’t have any problems the rest of the year.

My journey to understand who my father was before I knew him must necessarily end at the moment I become a nasty, bellowing newborn. So this last incident involves how my father and mother put themselves in a position to create such a repellent creature as the newly-minted me. When my father was 23, he noticed my mom and found he wanted her to be aware of his existence, and also to consider it a good thing. But my father suffered from incredible shyness, and he couldn’t think of anything to do that would make this happen.

My father’s younger sister was my mom’s best friend. He asked his sister if she could help him, and she said, “You bet!” His sister asked my mom to go out Saturday night, as they often did, and my mom said sure. On Saturday my father and his sister arrived at my mom’s house in his car. My mom thought it odd that my father was there, but she shrugged and got in the car. Then my father’s sister said, “Oh, I forgot I have something to do!” and she buggered off, leaving my father and mom alone on what had just become a date.

They went to the local establishment where everyone in town gathered on Saturday nights. My mom knew everybody, and she laughed, and danced, and had a great time with her friends. My father, rather less outgoing, sat in the corner all night drinking beer and said nothing to anyone—including my mom.

The evening ended, and the time to go home arrived. In the parking lot my parents found that someone had parked their car behind my father’s car, and he couldn’t get out. He solved this problem by picking up the back end of the offending car and dragging it out of the way so he could leave. My mom thought, “Huh.” That is exactly what she later told me she thought, word for word. During the ride back to my mom’s house, my father still said nothing. He let her out at the curb and drove away. My mom went into the house and thought that this was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.

On Sunday evening, with no planning or discussion, my father pulled up in front of my mom’s house. As my mom looked out the window, she felt perplexed and unsure of what to do. She didn’t see many options, so she went outside and got in my father’s car, and they drove away on their second date.

Six months later they were married.

Unfortunately, none of these incidents include anything about my father’s hangovers or his back hair. My picture of him as a young man remains a fuzzy sketch. But it’s a start. After all, any kid who threatens to throw a dog at his mom has to grow into a father to be proud of.

I don’t have many enemies, but I look upon the ones I have with venomous wrath. If I were allowed to select their eternal torments, my first choice would be drowning in a lake of boiling excrement while insane hornets hatch from their ear canals. If that’s unavailable, my second choice would be sitting in a hospital room, staring at a sick person in the bed, feeling stupid and helpless.

People don’t go to hospital rooms for amusement. They are neither fun nor funny. I don’t know of any jokes that begin, “A nurse, a man with no kidneys, and a bag of plasma walk into a bar…” Patients don’t go to these rooms voluntarily—they’re carted in on vans like veal delivered to an Italian restaurant. Their family and friends are dragged along by affection, obligation, sympathy, and terror.

When you’re sitting in a hospital room, you know almost nothing about what’s happening around you. The nurse could be injecting a pain killer, or she could be sucking the blood out of your mother’s heart for a satanic ritual. You’d never know the difference. Your ignorance is matched only by your inability to accomplish anything more useful than shifting pillows and moving flowers closer to the window. It’s not exactly busy work, but you know it has nothing to do with whether the patient will be breathing when she leaves the room.

When a person lies in a hospital bed, the room tightens with the pressure of uncertainty. I imagine it feels like the inside of a shaken soda can. That pressure erodes you, and you start begging nurses and doctors for slivers of information that might say what direction things are headed, and how long this whole experience has to last. You unobtrusively consider death, even if the patient is only suffering from a hernia. Death has been in this room, and it marked its territory like a bear. It can snatch anyone it wants in here.

You focus on the patient, which is the one thing you think you understand. If she doesn’t want to talk about her pain, you talk about what a bitch Aunt Lilly is when she calls for a half-hour chat. If she does want to talk about her pain, you nod and tell her that things will be better soon. If she doesn’t want to talk, you hold her hand. Fussy patients are the best, since they give you a lot to do. You bring blankets, adjust the bed, help them cheat on their hospital diet, and comb their hair. It relieves you more than it relieves them. If the patient wants socks and ice chips, then maybe she wants life, too.

After a ponderous length of time, you find out how this will end. If the patient is going home, you first want to know when, because you’ve got to get out of here before you’re reduced to paste. You tell the patient how great she looks, and you talk about having dinner next week, and you pack up vases of flowers that she’ll throw away tomorrow. And everyone talks, with sterling reverence, about how glad they will be to get out of this hospital room. The tension bleeds off a bit, but not much, because pain still hangs in the air, and if it attacks again you couldn’t do anything about it. At last you exit this room with its fake air and crappy TV and wall paint that’s trying a little too hard to be cheerful.

If the patient will never ride a wheelchair out of this room alive, the pressure intensifies—sort of as if the hospital room was now on the ocean floor beside the Titanic’s engine room. You knew earlier that you couldn’t do anything useful, but at least you hoped that someone else could. Now you know they can’t. You realize that there are not many good things to say to someone about to die. Maybe there aren’t any. So you let the patient say what she wants to say, and you hope your answers aren’t stupid and don’t upset her—as if anything you could say would upset her more. As the patient slides away, the air gets as tight as harp strings. Each time she closes her eyes, you feel a nick of panic that you’ve forgotten something important and now time’s run out. When she’s finally unconscious, nothing else can be said. Maybe you try anyway and tell her things you think you’d like to hear. Maybe you stare at her, trapped like a bird in the ugly hospital sheets that have carried dozens into death before her. Maybe you lean back in a plastic chair and pretend you won’t be relieved when it’s all over and you can get out of here. Maybe you sing to her, and she cries in her sleep. That has nothing to do with your singing, but no one around is a big enough jerk to tell you that.

When the patient leaves the room, it collapses on itself. Occupied, it had character. All of its character was lousy, but it had some. Now it droops like an empty balloon, as purposeless and generic as you could imagine. The patient carried every splinter of life away with her when she left. Then you leave too, perhaps with a happy rush, or perhaps wandering out like the victim of a train crash. But in any case, you leave with relief.

That relief is what helps you go through this and not smash clocks and chew on tires. And that relief is what I wish to deny my enemies. Or at least I thought I did. After a little reflection, maybe I’ll just poke my enemies in the eye and put a rat in their beer.