Month: October 2011

My short story “The Santa Fix” was published today by Open Heart Publishing in the anthology “An Honest Lie, Volume 3: Justifiable Hypocrisy“. It’s available in paper format now, and will be offered in electronic format soon.

I think that the anthology itself has a lot going for it. The 14 stories were selected from over 5000 submissions. Open Heart Publishing is dedicated to green publishing, using print on demand to keep inventory low and reduce deforestation. That makes the cost of an individual book a little higher, but overall it’s worth it. And the physical copy of the book is a really beautiful, high quality volume.
 
Of the 14 auhors in the anthology, the one who generates the greatest interest will be given a book contract a year from now. So I would be tremendously grateful for any support anyone would like to offer.

Simply voting for me costs nothing, so please do that if you can. Just go to the site and click my name on the left side to give me 1 point. You’re not limited to one vote in the contest. Vote early, vote often!

Purchasing a copy of the book through the publisher’s website by clicking my name earns me 500 points, which is a huge boost for me. If you purchase through a retail outlet like Amazon, then I get no points at all, so please use this link.

 
An Honest Lie, Volume 3: Justifiable Hypocrisy

My wife owns a magnificent Tiffany lamp that I despise. This lamp hasn’t done anything to offend me, and it’s not defective in any way that other people would care about. I just don’t like Tiffany lamps. They seem untidy to me. Maybe even gaudy. I know that people think the damn things are beautiful. But I think you could smash a dozen different wine bottles in a bucket and pour in a pot of glue, and eight hours later you’d have something quite as attractive as any Tiffany lamp ever created.

I suppose they’re just not my thing.

She received this monstrosity as a Christmas gift a long time ago. We celebrated Christmas at my parents’ house that year, and early in the afternoon my dad and I happened to be talking about light fixtures. That wasn’t an unlikely topic of conversation for us, along with diesel engines, construction equipment, the probability of exceedingly unlikely events, and how to beat games that are inherently crooked. For some reason only God and The Great Kreskin know, the words, “I don’t really like Tiffany lamps,” came out of my mouth. My dad grinned slightly, and that should have warned me. An hour later my wife unwrapped a big Tiffany lamp while my dad laughed at me and shook his head.

Of course my wife adored the lamp, as would any normal person. I lobbied to put the lamp in the spare room, or maybe next to the washing machine. My wife instead chose to use the thing as her bedside light, where she could look at it every evening. So this mass of fused glass and lead resembling a great wad of dragon snot sat five feet from me for eight hours a day, or about one third of the rest of my life—until tonight.

When my wife turned on the Tiffany horror this evening, I heard her say, “Oh damn.” I looked around, and the lamp was not spreading its crazy-quilt of light across the room in which I was expected to rest. That didn’t cheer me particularly, as I figured the bulb had burned out, although as my wife walked out of the bedroom to get a new bulb I considered flinging the lamp to the floor and blaming it on two or three of the cats. She returned and replaced the bulb, and—still no light. The lamp had been flickering a bit for some time, and now it had obviously reached the end of its miserable existence.

“I guess we can go lamp shopping tomorrow!” I said, as if we’d be shopping for kittens and magic beans.

“No,” she said. “Maybe we can fix it.”

I didn’t want to flat out lie to her. “Well… I guess it can be fixed.”

She held up the switch, which was in the cord itself. “I think the problem is here. I heard it crackling.”

“We might be able to fix that then.” I chewed the inside of my cheek. “If we can find another switch at Home Depot or somewhere.” I said that as if it were as likely as finding the Crown Jewels at Dairy Queen.

We took the hopefully deceased-beyond-redemption lamp to a room that had real light. My wife pointed out that the switch was a bit loose, so maybe we could take it apart and tighten everything up. I silently admitted that I was screwed.

I fetched my tiny screwdrivers that my dad had given me, because every guy needs tiny screwdrivers. We disassembled the switch. Like an oaf I dropped the teensy nut that held the screw in place. It was about the size of a sesame seed. I wondered if I’d subconsciously dropped the thing hoping it would disappear forever, maybe stolen by a cartoon mouse or something. But my wife found the nut, and we carried out a somewhat bumbling but successful switch repair.

We only needed to slip the tiny nut back into place and screw the switch together. But I found that my hand didn’t want to put the nut in place. In fact, it wanted to put the nut everyplace except the proper location. My hand shook all the hell over the place. Oh, so this is the way it’s going to be, you bastard, I thought to my hand, and I gave the nut to my wife for proper emplacement in the switch.

This was a surprise, but not a shock. My hands had been amusing me with random shaking off and on for a few months. It had annoyed me, but it hadn’t slowed me down all that much. I had asked a really nice neurologist to check it out for me. After a bunch of cool tests, the highlight of which was sleeping through an MRI, he assured me that no brain tumor was about to kill me. That made me happy. He followed that with, “So get used to this shaking thing. It’s like your dad’s. It won’t kill you, but it ain’t getting any better.” I guess that’s not an exact quote. He used more medical terms than that, and I think he said “probe” at least once. He also said there are some interesting drugs for this, but they make you sleepy. They can completely control the shaking, but you’ll be completely unconscious while they do it. No thanks.

So as my wife carried the resurrected Tiffany lamp back to the bedroom in glory, I reflected that this was the first time I’d been entirely unable to do some dumb little thing because my hands were becoming disobedient shits. The hand rebellion is headed south from here, although how far and how fast is a mystery. I sat at the table in the good light, pouted, and oozed displeasure, which helped me exactly zero.

Well, it ought to be fun to see where this goes. When my dad was younger, there wasn’t much he couldn’t do with his hands. Today, getting food into his mouth is a challenge. Dialing a telephone is out of the question. Writing and typing—well that sure as hell isn’t going to happen.

On the other hand, there are things to look forward to. If I’m subtle, I might be able to break the Tiffany lamp someday and claim it wasn’t my fault. My hand just did it all on its own. Don’t blame me.

Premier online humor site “The Onion” today announced a bold strategic initiative that will transition it into a second-rate purveyor of shoddy goods via the internet. While this move surprised some analysts, Senior VP of Change Management Luis Abregado said, “We’ve gone about as far as we can go with humor. Face it, how many times can you write cuttingly sarcastic articles about mundane things while working in the term ‘douche bag’? We need to provide more shareholder value, and there’s a growing opportunity in pushing snarky t-shirts and following the sales up with shitty service.”

Abregado pointed to a recent apparel order as an example. Long-time reader Bill McCurry ordered a women’s cream-colored “Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day” t-shirt for his wife, placing the order on August 31. The Onion team determined that the shirt was out of stock and immediately did not a single god damn thing. Fulfillment Clerk Clem Smith personally handled the fucking around and doing nothing. “I figured maybe somebody had made a mistake,” he explained, “so I didn’t want to, like, make another one. I just waited to see what would happen. Hell, maybe the whole thing would go away by itself, you know?”

The Onion encourages all its customers to order fine products like this one from The Onion Store.

When Mr. McCurry inquired online about his order on September 23, The Onion Customer Service team jumped in and responded after sitting on their asses for three days. Service Rep Larry Sim said, “If you answer right away then the customer starts to expect that kind of behavior. It’s bad business. You’re better off setting the expectation right away that they’ll be treated like crotch fungus.” The Onion sent an email including the sentences, “Thank you for contacting us!” and, “I apologize that we did not contact you sooner!” following Customer Service best practice that vapid and pleasant exclamations entirely make up for behaving like a willfully incompetent slice of ass-crust. Sim offered to fulfill his valued customer’s order with a white shirt rather than a cream-colored shirt, and Mr. McCurry agreed.

In many slip-shod retail operations the process might then break down, and an order could be shipped to the customer. But The Onion is aiming to become a world class fucked-up online store. Using a proprietary “double-redundancy” process, The Onion staff drew secret lots to determine who would hide the customer’s order in a random location, almost guaranteeing that no one would think about the “Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day” t-shirt unless someone started screaming about it. “This process enables us to get on with the critical business of ignoring all the other dumb motherfuckers’ orders,” Sim said. “One advantage is that when Mr. McCurry inquired about his order again on October 10, we could just wait a few days and tell him, ‘Hey dude, it’s being fulfilled and shipped today!’ even though we had no idea where it was or really even what the fuck he ordered. We’re writing a paper on this process to present at the Kick Your Customers Hard in the Balls Conference next spring.”

While The Onion hasn’t ironed out every wrinkle in its new initiative, it has made an impressive show of moving from a creative, witty, highly-cherished institution to a completely pedestrian shit-box merchant. Abregado said, “The real beauty is that even though this moron emailed us again on October 26 whining about his order, we can just ignore him forever if we want. We charged his credit card on August 31, so we’ve already got his fucking money.”

Yesterday a lady told me, “I like men who are gentlemen. Until it’s time for them not to be.”

Well crap. I’m confused enough about this gentleman thing without having to figure out when it’s time to stop being one. It’s like saying, “I like freezers that make ice. Until it’s time for them to stop making ice. And I’m not going to tell the freezer when to stop making ice, or what it should start making instead. Maybe the freezer should start making bran muffins. Yeah, let it try that, and then I’ll tell the freezer whether more bran muffins are really what we need around here.”

My parents never told me what it means to be a gentleman. I think they were too busy paying bills and fixing whatever I broke, insulted, or destroyed. So I just watched my dad and figured I was seeing the gentleman thing in action. I carried those nuggets of gentlemanly behavior with me out of childhood, and when I set off on my young man’s life I forgot every one of them. Who needs to be a gentleman when you can drink 160 proof punch, mumble at girls in a language that doesn’t exist, and puke indiscriminately?

When I outgrew all that, I found myself puzzled about gentlemanly behavior. I did some research. No joking. I discovered that a gentleman did things like hold chairs, hold doors, and hold purses for his lady. He would kiss her hand, kiss her forehead, kiss the back of her neck, and kiss her nose. He would be confident, be humble, be polite, and be willing to punch somebody for her. He would dress well, but not better than her. He would never keep her waiting, but he’d be okay if she kept him waiting. He’d never forget anniversaries or birthdays, and of course he’d learn to play the guitar.

There was a lot more like that.

The thing bothered me about these recitations of gentlemanly behaviors was that all of them are directed at the object of the gentleman’s matchless love. It seemed as if being a gentleman, as opposed to being just a man, springs from how a man treats the woman he loves. That seemed unlikely to me. I figured there were about six billion people on the planet. Am I a gentleman because of how I treat one of them, or because of how I treat 5,999,999,999 of them?

I thought about that for a while, and I tried to separate being a man from being a gentleman. A male human can be a man without being a gentleman. I do not cling to any doubts about that. I’ve known a lot of honest, courageous, faithful, and generous men, enough to demolish all the hot wings a large sports bar—but many of them were not gentlemen. (And by the way, when did it become okay to charge seven bucks for a plate of chicken parts that we used to throw away?)

So you can be a man without being a gentleman, but you can’t be a gentleman without being a man. That’s axiomatic. I think maybe Pythagoras even said it, or one of those other ancient smart fellows. And if that’s true, then I can only be a gentleman if I do something extra, something more than the things required to be a man. Something I can do for everyone I meet, and not just for the woman with whom I share saliva.

A list of those things might be pretty long. I could give everyone I meet a puppy, or a popsicle, or a t-shirt that says “Kiss Me If You Have A Strong Immune System.” I could tell them a joke. I could refrain from singing them a song. I could compliment them on one of their entirely unexceptional physical features. I could give them a massage in a way that’s friendly, and not like an unwashed creep with baggy trousers and an under bite. I could do all those things, but what I’m really looking for is a unifying principle for being a gentleman. What is the theme here?

I thought back to my dad and tried to remember if he gave everybody something. It couldn’t have been much, because his Sears credit card was generally charged to the limit. He didn’t tell jokes or give compliments, and he sure as hell didn’t give massages. He gave us a puppy once, which is a point in his favor. It was a toy poodle as dumb as a chunk of excrement and mean as a snake, so I’ll take that point right back.

I only remember one thing that my dad gave everybody. He did whatever he needed to do to make everybody around him feel comfortable. Even safe. No matter who he was with, they didn’t need to worry about being embarrassed, or left out, or the point of someone else’s joke. He didn’t try to make them happy. In fact, it’s impossible to make some people happy. But they could feel respected, even if they weren’t too respectable themselves when you got down to it. They might even feel that nothing horrible could happen to them right then, because my dad had banned horrible from the room. As a boy, I felt safe when I heard him snoring in his bedroom. If I heard him snore today, I’m sure everybody around would feel safe too.

A gentleman does whatever he needs to do to help the people around him feel comfortable. That’s my working definition. So when in the name of Gregory Peck is it time to stop being a gentleman? I suppose that would be when it’s time for people to stop feeling comfortable. I can think of two times that would be true.

You don’t want people to feel comfortable when they’re about to hurt somebody, and you don’t want them to feel comfortable when they’re about to hurt themselves. If someone is kicking his dog, or screaming at his spouse, then maybe it’s time for the gentleman in you to take a break. And if someone is throwing back his twelfth Wild Turkey shot, or committing professional suicide by doing something rude in his boss’s desk drawer, the gentleman in you should go outside, smoke a cigarette, and play with his iPad.

“I like men who are gentlemen. Until it’s time for them not to be.” When that lady expressed this astounding observation to me, I asked her how a man was supposed to figure out such a thing. She suggested that I might need a flow chart. Well, this isn’t a damned flow chart, but at least now I have something to go by. And now that I think about it, there may be a third situation in which the time arrives to stop being a gentleman. Sometimes the gentleman in you ought to stop outside the bedroom door while the rest of you goes on inside. Everyone’s better off if he hangs out in the living room and plays Wii for a while. I may run that concept past that lady and see what she says.

I made a history professor look like an idiot once. It was great. In fact, it is one of my most treasured college memories. This professor didn’t like to talk about history, although I think it was his job. He instead liked to spend 90 minutes twice a week explaining how stupid all of us were, and how inferior we were to the students at West Point. Yes, it confused us too. But the class was required and the professor didn’t care if we did any actual work, so we kept showing up.

One day the professor paused after an impassioned burst of disgust, in which he had uttered the word “extirpate.” He then stated that none of us probably knew how to spell that word, let alone what it meant. He paused again. I thought maybe he’d realized that this wasn’t an English class after all, but was instead History, and maybe he should talk about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or something. But he continued to look at us as if we had fed his dog a poisoned toad, so I spoke up and spelled the damned thing for him. After flash of aggravation, he riposted with the equivalent of a schoolyard challenge, “Sure, you can spell it. But I bet you don’t know what it means!”

I gave this boob the definition of “extirpate.” He grunted like an alligator that’s been kicked in its scaly green scrotum, paused another moment, and went on painting his word picture of the glorious West Point quadrangle. If I recall, I made an A in that course, and I earned a memory to hold dear throughout all the subsequent years.

Until last week, when at the grocery store I ran into a college classmate I hadn’t seen since graduation. In fact, we barely recognized one another. But after we’d each bragged about our jobs and families and so forth, we naturally reminisced about college. And I brought up the “extirpate” incident with a certain amount of glee. As I began to remind him of the details, an uncomfortable feeling arose in my belly. My friend was not nodding at me in shared joyful recollection. He was squinting at me in puzzled incomprehension and possibly suspicion that I might be on drugs. I asked him what was wrong. Didn’t he remember this blow that I had delivered on behalf of all us moderately annoyed students?

He remembered it. But he didn’t remember it the way I was describing it. He maintained that the professor never talked about West Point. He talked about Notre Dame. In each class he only spent 30 minutes talking about how stupid we were. He then spent 30 minutes talking about actual history, and 30 minutes talking about his investments. He was especially excited about silver, and he advised us all to buy it quickly while it was still at $20 per ounce. With regard to the incident, the professor did make a “spell extirpate” comment, and I had taken the challenge. But as I spelled the word correctly, most of my classmates lounged behind me rolling their eyes. The professor did not issue a ringing challenge to define the word. He mumbled a “probably don’t know the meaning,” and without pausing he drowned out my definition with some bullshit about the New Deal, ignoring me as if I were an aggravating freshman. Which I was.

As my classmate’s re-sculpting of the past sank in, I felt as if I’d just discovered I was nothing but a six foot tall Ken doll. This had thrown my entire history into question. Not just my college history. Everything was uncertain. If I was so mistaken about the “extirpate” incident, what memories could I count on? And memories are important. I felt sure about that. Almost my entire understanding of my existence depended on my memories. In fact, everything except the moment that is currently in progress is nothing but memories.

I sat down in the produce aisle, squishing two grapes and a kiwi with my right buttock. I began hyperventilating. My friend couldn’t find a paper bag, so he tried to help me breathe into a plastic produce bag. I inhaled the plastic and almost suffocated. While I was blacking out, so many things became clear to me. I recalled the dozens of times I had felt sure my wife was crazy for telling me I’d seen a movie, when I knew perfectly well I hadn’t. She hadn’t been crazy after all. I had just failed to grasp the reality of my own existence. When I’d met people from a recent party, and they looked at me with admiration because I’m such a fun guy—those looks were full of something other than admiration, weren’t they?

Shit. I owe my sister a whole lot of apologies.

When I got home from the hospital I sat in my office, reconstructing my entire life from a whole new perspective. I wondered if I could buy “Sorry I was an unfathomable jerk” cards at a quantity discount. After a time the uncertainty made me want to move into a mountain cabin and grow a beard that could be woven into a bathmat.

And then I grabbed for a branch of sanity. I got on the internet and looked up that surly squid of a history professor to see what had happened to him. It took a while, but I tracked him down in an insignificant article from an obscure newspaper. A number of years after I graduated, he was “arrested after a student claimed he had tried to lure her into a prostitution ring.”

Ah, salvation. Although the charges were later dropped, this fact halted my memory’s mudslide into oblivion. If I’d been right about that bastard, maybe I could count on some of my other recollections. I launched another Google search and found the official definition of “extirpate.” It was close enough to the one I’d flung at that unwholesome chunk of liver in a tacky JC Penney sport coat. “To exterminate; to do away with.” As in to extirpate my sense of existential panic. At least I got that right. Who knew what else I could salvage?

But for now, I have to go apologize to my wife for bitching about all those movies I “never saw.”

I’m trying to decide whether I’m having a mid-life crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a petulant fit. I googled each of them, but I couldn’t find any distinct definitions to help me figure this out. Maybe they’re all quite similar. Maybe I have all three at once, which I suspect would be novel.

Certain behaviors tend to come along with a mid-life crisis. They include quitting your job to weave rugs in New Mexico, buying a penis-shaped sports car you can’t afford, joining a gym you will never visit, having an affair with the most inappropriate person you can think of, spending a year’s salary on plastic surgery and hair implants, and acting like such a gigantic weasel’s crotch that your spouse has to chain herself to the toilet to keep from murdering you every night. If you allow that my wife only chains herself to a metaphorical toilet, then just one of these applies to me. Therefore, I’m putting mid-life crisis at the bottom of the list for now.

On the other hand, a nervous breakdown seems to be a short-term thing. It usually shows up as depression or anxiety. In my life, I refer to that as Tuesday. Therefore, I’m classifying nervous breakdown as “unlikely.”

So, I’m going with “petulant fit.”

Ten years ago I could optimistically say that I still had more years ahead of me than behind me, barring a catastrophic carnival accident. I can’t fool myself like that anymore. I heard someone say, “50 is the new 20,” the other day. I don’t know about him, but when I was 20 I had a lot less trouble peeing.

So my brain is telling me things like, “If you don’t go for it now, when will you? This may be your last chance.” Coincidentally, this is precisely the same sales technique used to peddle time share condos, so I should know better when I listen to my brain say this shit. But instead I allow my brain to lure me into an unnatural state. I have fallen into a state of “yearning.”

What the hell is “yearning”? It’s kind of like “wanting,” except that wanting is done with the heart, and yearning is done with everything from your belly button to your knees—yes, including those bits. What do I yearn for? I yearn for the things any adult my age desires: for people to read my mind and give me exactly what I want, to do whatever I love doing all day and for people to pay me lots of money regardless of how good I really am, to find so much variety and spontaneity in each day that I forget I’m just the same old me, and to have more sex than the Sultan of Morocco. The usual things.

I lack a solid plan for achieving any of this. I don’t really have a plan at all. I do have a disorganized collection of vague hopes, so I feel I’m well on my way. Even better, I envision that everything will be accomplished through the efforts of other people and without much inconvenience to me. What this scheme lacks in specificity it makes up for in warm fuzzies for me.

I do have one responsibility. When I think events are moving away from me securing everything for which I yearn, I must behave like a tiger with hemorrhoids and aggravate everyone around me to such an insane level that they start paying more attention to what I want. Then I can go back to aggravating them the normal amount.

And I will keep doing this. Relentlessly. Until I get everything I yearn for. 

Definitely “petulant fit.”

As I was sitting in the hospital room, waiting for my mom to wake up, I pondered the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that seems to have gained a bit of momentum. I’m a fan of civil unrest and social improvement, but the “99%” folks seem rather irked about promises they think were made to them by someone–I’m not sure who. This goes along the line of “I was promised that if I worked hard and followed the rules I would have success, but now I’m just under a ton of student loans and have no job. What the hell’s up with that?”

After considering this for a bit, I came up with a statement of solidarity with them:

While I strive for a better society, which is a noble thing, I must remember that nothing in life is fair, whether dealt by nature or by mankind. Regardless of my efforts, there is no guarantee of success, or opportunity, or even survival. If I believe anyone who promises otherwise, I am a fool. And I must accept my culpability for my own circumstances, for to do otherwise is to abdicate my power to change them.

That constitutes my attempts at political/philosophical bullshit for the year.

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