Category: Humor

My wife had an enormous hole jack-hammered into her jaw yesterday. Her dentist implanted a post, on which a crown will later be placed. The procedure’s a bit pricey, but compared to what she’s worth, the cost is 1 divided by infinity.

The dentist numbed the area with a bucket-full of Lidocaine. My wife is one of the happy few whose mouth resists anesthetic. So by the time she was ready for the procedure, she was deadened from her esophagus to the back of her skull. Then they opened her jaw like she was an anaconda and worked on her with the world’s tiniest hammer-drill. For the final step they jammed a shiny silver post into the hole. It reminded me of the spike driven at the meeting of the transcontinental railroad.

The nurse brought her to me in a wheelchair. She needed it. The dentist had wanted to protect my wife from anxiety, so he’d prescribed Ativan for her to take before the procedure. One of my friends took this drug for anxiety a while back. The dentist gave my wife eight times as much as that fellow took, so she was unable to walk. However, she was able to stumble from the wheelchair into the passenger seat of our car. On the drive home she chatted with Buddha and the Tooth Fairy about what a bitch Glenda the Good really is.

We arrived home. As I guided my sweetie into the house she mumbled about needing to clean the litter boxes and wash clothes, as soon as she sits down for a few minutes. I told her it’s all taken care of, and that she’ll probably sleep the rest of the day. She then drifted into the kitchen, where she sagged against various kitchen counters and prepared her ibuprofen, her antibiotics, some tea, and other necessities, while I hovered, trying to aim her at a chair and making sure she didn’t put rat poison in her tea.

At last she sat enfolded in her favorite recliner, which we call “The Womb.” She had a small table beside her holding tea, water, ibuprofen, and an icepack. On the other side sat tissues, two TV remote controls, and an iPad. Two cats drowsed across her legs and tummy. I crept off to let her sleep. She called me back, wanting to know how long she should leave on the icepack, how long she should leave it off before putting it on again, and what time she could stop using the thing altogether. I answered her questions and resumed my creeping.

Over the next few hours, when I checked she was sometimes asleep and sometimes not. The TV played programs occasionally interesting enough for her to look at. I brought her some yogurt, which was good exercise since she had to repel a cat attempting to seize it. Evening found her vertical and in the kitchen, stable on her feet, and talking about food.

“I don’t know why I’m so tired,” she said with perfect sincerity.

“You went through a lot today. And you had a lot of Ativan.”

As she selected a tomato she did not reply, and she gave no sign that she accepted my hypothesis.

I tried again. “It’ll probably take a little while to recover. They carved a big hole in your head.”

She didn’t look up from slicing her tomato. “When I had my tooth pulled I didn’t feel like this.”

“Well, this was a different procedure. This was probably harder on you.”

She didn’t respond.

I considered reiterating that she’d swallowed enough Ativan to kill a pony. But I realized that my arguments meant nothing stacked against her determination to press on and function, even if wild dogs were chewing off her leg. She’s a rock. You can drill a big hole in a rock, and it just keeps rolling.

So, instead I kissed her head on the side away from the new hole. “I imagine you’ll feel better soon.”

She flipped me a smile that was a bit pained on the left side. “Thanks for doing the kitty litter.”

When I decided to become a writer, I received a license to whine. More correctly, I gave myself a license to aggravate everyone I know with my whining. They can’t shut me up, unless they want to beat me to death with my laptop and toss my body in a ditch. I think they don’t do that because I threw a great New Year’s party one time, and they’re hoping I’ll throw another one.

I whine about having no ideas, having bad ideas, not enough time to write, how much time writing takes, writing myself into a corner, hating the characters I created, having to kill characters I love, not knowing how to end a story, finishing a story and being depressed about leaving it, and reading books that make me realize everything I’ve ever written sucked. But my most profound whining comes when friends and family fail to show a slavering interest in my work and my writing process.

Perhaps a friend never gives me feedback on the 200,000 word monster I forced on her. Maybe a friend took three months to review my story, when I know that during that time he read someone else’s novel in two days. I may know that a friend read my book until four pages from the end and then let it sit on the desk for a week. Some friend may finish and point out a dozen typos, and when I press for details all she says is, “I really liked it.”

At these times I become dejected, and I whine. The fact that other friends provide me fantastic help doesn’t seem to lift my gloom.

But today I realized something. Writing isn’t an ego-boosting activity. Writing isn’t a holy calling worthy of everyone’s attention. Writing is a job. How many people have jobs about which they expect their friends to get all enthused? Sure, all of my friends read, so I expect them to be interested in my writing. But say I was a plumber. All of my friends use the toilet, but I wouldn’t expect them to get excited about how I replaced a P-trap at work today.

So I’m resolving to whine less and work more. Perhaps my friends will stop pretending they’ve snorted salsa up their nose when I approach them at parties. That would be nice. I just have to keep in mind that when I’m writing, it’s no more than the social equivalent of fixing a toilet.

I am facing extinction. Technology-extinction, to be precise. I’m not incapable. I don’t fear computers; computers fear me. I program my VCR and I set up my wireless network at home. After a trip to Fry’s, I fiddle with a screwdriver for a while, and a PC appears on my desk. Yet I’ll soon be exiled to the technology ice floe and thereafter devoured by a killer whale that’s sick of eating seal. This is because I cannot understand, nor be understood by, my fellow men of technology.

My god-daughter Wendy, a sweet 9th grader, drove this realization through my heart yesterday. She sent me a text that vibrated with excitement. I text a lot, but I text in real words. Sometimes I use punctuation. Occasionally I use semicolons. Wendy’s text was:

USBM- c ths gr8 pm

? i cmpr u 2 smmr dy
u r HPOA & kewl
rf wnds FUBAR prtty flwrs f my
smmr O
smtms sn FAH
& smtms sn SITD
& evry CSA smtms gs 2 hll
by SOL or SOP
bt ur a BBW 4evr
u wnt bcm a BUFF
u wnt ESAD
whn u & ths pm r BFFTTE

whl mn LLAP or i’s cn c
whl ths is AAS no AMF 4 u

She really is a sweet girl. So I texted her back, saying, “What is this? Do you have a brain tumor?” She responded:

N! ‘tis shkspr

I pondered this for several hours. Finally I realized that this was supposed to be Shakespeare! Specifically, this should be Sonnet 18, which it resembles in no way. Sonnet 18 is:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I sent Wendy another text, saying, “I don’t get it. Help me understand, or I’ll show up at your freshman prom with a video camera and a powder blue tuxedo.” To which Wendy texted in reply:

USBM ur qt

Should I compare you to a summer day?
You are a Hot Piece Of Ass and cool:
Rough winds Fuck Up Beyond All Recognition the pretty flowers of May,
Summer’s Over:
Sometimes the sun is Fucking Ass Hot,
And sometimes the sun is Sitting In The Dark;
And every Cool Sweet Awesome sometimes goes to hell,
By Shit Out of Luck or Standard Operating Procedure:
But you’re a Big Beautiful Woman forever
You won’t become a Big Ugly Fat Fucker;
You won’t Eat Shit And Die,
When you and this poem are Best Friends Forever Til The End:

While men Live Long And Prosper or eyes can see:
While this is Alive And Smiling no Adios Mother Fucker for you.

The fact that I didn’t comprehend her first text tells me that I shall soon be as dead as a diplodocus. But that is merely the third most pathetic fact in this saga. The second most pathetic fact is that I realized USBM means “Uncle Satan Bastard Man.”

And the most pathetic fact of all? Wendy’s revised version, all spelled out, is more understandable than the original.

When I walk away and leave cheese-encrusted dishes in the sink, I know that it’s wrong. If I were a puppy, my ears would droop and I’d crawl under the couch. But since I’m not a puppy, I pretend it’s a simple oversight, and that my wife and I will forget all about it as soon as we sit down to watch TV. I pretend that all of this is true, but in fact I have done nothing less than given up the moral high ground.

By “moral high ground,” I don’t refer to big moral questions. I don’t mean whether I want to raise or lower taxes, whether or not I eat meat, or whether I advocate school prayer. (In fact, I prayed in school, but they were desperate prayers that I not get caught, so I don’t think that counts.) Instead, I mean the fragile yet devastating balance of moral superiority between two people who are intimate and feel that killing one another would be inappropriate.

Here’s an example of moral high ground. Say I’m working late, and afterwards my coworkers and I decide to get dinner. We spend an hour in a mediocre chain restaurant. I eat a Mesquite Chicken Platter with coleslaw, and I drink two beers. We hang out for another hour bitching about our customers, drinking more beer and eating stale dinner rolls. Then I drive home, walk in the door, and realize several things. I did not call my wife to assure her I hadn’t been killed in a Russian mafia carjacking. I did not stop at the cleaners or the drug store on my way home. And I did not bring her a chocolate lava cake.

I have just surrendered the moral high ground. I am wallowing through the mud of my bad behavior, enabling her to lob missiles of righteousness down upon me if she wants to.

Losing the moral high ground is easy. At least it’s easy for me, because I’m a dumbass. Taking the moral high ground is difficult because everyone starts off on top of Morality Hill. If your partner doesn’t tumble down the hill by himself, you must achieve moral superiority by kicking your partner down the hill when he isn’t looking. Once you’ve lost the high ground, it’s nearly impossible to take it back without help. And by help, I mean that your partner refrains from rolling any boulders down the hill at you while you climb up.

Now, let’s jump to the Saturday morning after my chocolate lava cake failure. I suggest that we go to the museum, since I figure my wife might like that better than watching more reruns of “The Unit.” As we drive up the tollway, physically we’re sitting together in cozy proximity. Morally, she looms above me like Zeus. She says, with perfect good will, “Hey, let’s go to the craft fair.”

I’d rather eat a scorpion than go to the craft fair, I think. But what I say is, “Sure, that sounds good.” I am so far down the side of Morality Hill that I would agree to go to a barbecued baby cookout, and I’d bring lemonade.

“Well, if you don’t want to go…” my wife says.

“I want to go!” I fling her my most sincere fake smile. Is she just messing with me?

“We’ll just stay an hour or so. They have really cute puppies.”

We don’t need a puppy! Does she want a puppy? She didn’t exactly say that… “I’d like to see the puppies,” I say. Because I’m such a moral invertebrate right now, I don’t feel I can entrench myself in a strong anti-puppy position. But I do examine the rear view mirror more than necessary and avoid further comments.

By afternoon I have trudged through the craft fair, visited the museum, and returned home puppy-less. We own some red ceramic roosters that may cause me to blind myself someday rather than look upon them, and I’m cleaning cat vomit off my pillow. I feel that my wife has allowed me to climb most of the way back up to the moral high ground, and I reek of gratitude.

The balance of moral superiority is delicate, but its power is undeniable. I’m hoping that my wife backs the car into the garage door soon. I’ve had my eye on a flat screen TV.

I’m watching an hour-long television program about chrome. The guide says that it will visit a factory in which chrome is added to a truck. It will also visit a parking lot in which chrome is scratched off a truck. I believe that all of the television has now been produced. They must have made every other program the human mind can grasp before they resorted to making this program, therefore the entire body of television work has now been completed. If anybody is looking for me, I’ll be in the study pretending to read Chaucer while I play Angry Birds.

I realized this week that three desktop computers, three laptops, a smart phone, a cell phone, a digital camera, and two iPods are not enough information technology in my home. I have enough digital storage to hold every major film made in the last 15 years, yet my household cries out for more. So, I bought my wife an iPad.

Actually, she’s mentioned a couple of times that the thinks an iPad would be convenient for her. But I knew she wouldn’t buy one for herself until our kids were out of college. Considering that we have no children and don’t plan to have any, my wife’s iPad would be moping around, lonely on its shelf at Best Buy, for a long time. So I stalked an iPad, slapped down some cash, and brought it home to her.

My wife seemed thrilled. She read every word of the online manual before she plugged in her iPad, because that’s the kind of gal she is. Then she fired it up, hooked it to her Windows computer, and played with it. A few hours later she realized some things. (1) She wanted an iPad cover that wouldn’t attract cat hair. (2) She got an error every time she tried to register her iPad. (3) She got an error every time she tried to use iTunes—although iTunes still worked fine.

I realized that a trip to the Apple Store awaited us.

We arrived at the Apple Store at 2 PM on Saturday. It was like one of those photos of penguin hatching grounds, except that everyone had an iPhone grafted to his hand. Nice people helped my wife with a few questions, and she found an iPad cover in a classy shade of camel. Then we went to technical support.

Mike helped us. Some of the other Apple Store employees had told us that Mike was the best tech around, so I’ll admit I had high expectations. I expected strong Apple loyalty from Mike, and some serious proselytizing. That’s just doing a good job. But most of his explanations for the technical problems revolved around the complete inferiority of Windows. The rest involved the absolute inadequacy of Dell laptops. But he attacked the problems with fervor, and I maintained faith in him.

Mike’s fervor consisted of telling us to uninstall every Apple software component, restart the laptop, and wait for him to come back. This we did. After a while Mike came back and pronounced our work good. He paused to complain about the inferior knowledge and ability of his coworkers. Then he started to download iTunes, but he stopped to ask my wife, “Is this a 32-bit or 64-bit machine?”

My wife said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. It’s your computer. I’ll just install the 32-bit version, and if it’s wrong we’ll find out when it won’t run.” Mike clicked download.

I said, “Wait,” as Mike walked away. Mike did not wait. So I checked the laptop, downloaded the right iTunes version, and installed it. As I did so, I imagined my upcoming conversation with Mike when he returned.

“Hey Mike. Do you like Apple?” I would say.

“Sure.”

“So do you want to sell iPods and iPads and such only to the 12% of computer users who own Macs?”

“Heck no!”

“That means that Apple products need to work with Windows computers then, right?” I’d say.

“Well… I guess so…”

“So as the big tech brain around here, you ought to learn how to check the system properties on a Windows computer before you do something as fucking stupid as randomly loading a version of software without checking to see if it’s the right version, ya think? In fact, be honest—you knew perfectly well how to check it, you just wanted to walk away like a willfully incompetent motherfucker, right?”

“Yes, sir…” Mike would say while looking at his shoes.

About this time I realized that my wife was staring at me with concern. She might have noticed the sound of my teeth grinding—I’m not sure. She asked if I needed to leave the store in order to not disembowel Mike, who after all was probably a fairly nice guy if you got to know him over a beer. I said that I’d be good.

Mike returned. The reinstallation of iTunes had resolved none of my wife’s technical problems. Mike took a jaunty couple of steps backward and said, “That’s a Windows reinstallation problem! That’s what that is! A Windows reinstallation problem!” Then Mike gave us the toll free number for customer service.

I crushed a brand new camel colored iPad cover in my left hand as we packed up my wife’s unregistered iPad and whiny, error-spouting laptop. We walked out of the store and through the mall Food Court, past Panda Express, and into the parking lot. I discussed my thoughts with her. I might have cursed a few times. I’m certain that flecks of spit were flying.

Out in the crushing summer heat I said, “I was thinking about, maybe, buying a new iPhone while I was there. I’m sure as hell not going to now.”

“But what about the two people who were nice to us? That’s two out of three.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I may get a Droid.” I wiped a little foam off my lips.

“Just because of Mike? This one guy?” she asked.

I paused, teeth grinding again. “I’m vengeful…”

She squeezed my hand. “Yes, you are.”

Even from a young age, I have always been ambitious. At 4 years old I elevated my sights far beyond those of my peers. When other children were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they said things like an astronaut, or Superman, or a professional basketball player. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a buffalo and go out in the backyard and eat grass.

Now here I am years later, striding through the prime of my professional life. By the measures common to my people, to my family and others I know, my professional accomplishments have been reasonably successful. Yet when it’s quiet and drowsy in the evening I reflect that there’s very little grass in my diet, and I almost never buy shoes more than two at a time. Clearly I am the most abominable sort of pathetic failure.

Despite great amounts of retrospection, I can’t chart that point at which I strayed from the path of my true ambition. I just drifted off course like a drunken conquistador who lands in Inverness and insists on converting the Loch Ness Monster to Catholicism. Sure, it’s a lofty goal and a hell of a challenge. But somewhere along the way the point of the whole thing was lost.

My professional life is doing okay. I’m not bitching about my job. I’m just perplexed by the disconnect in my aspirations that has evolved over the years.

I went to work for myself when I was young. I’d like to observe something about working for yourself. It absolutely ruins you as an employee who works for other people—especially in a corporate environment. I am in no way kidding about this. You will forever be comparing your boss’s decisions with the decisions you would have made instead. If you’re an arrogant ass-jacket like me, you will usually think that your decisions are brilliant. You will always struggle between your conviction that your decision would have been perfect and the reality that it was not your damned decision to make.

When I went to work for myself, that would have been the perfect time for some ambition realignment. Yet I did nothing of the kind, and I can fault only my own weakness. I had allowed myself to be intimidated by the measures of my people. You see, when you’re four and want to be a buffalo, it’s charming. When you’re in fourth grade and want to be a buffalo, it’s an unacceptable life goal that raises concern and derision. I tend to learn things quickly, and I learned this lesson pretty darn snappy. From that point onwards I understood that my life would be a lot easier if I provided a more acceptable answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

My acceptable answer became, “I don’t know.” That remained my answer throughout my entire school career. And interestingly, that answer was invariably considered to be acceptable by everyone who ever asked the question.

Now if I were a bitter sort of person I could claim I was the victim of a certain prejudice against the buffalo lifestyle. I could also claim that such prejudice is anti-God, or at the very least anti-religious. What’s true for lilies should be true for buffalo, correct? Matthew 6:28 says, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” I’ve never seen a buffalo toil, although if I had to chew cud all day I’m pretty sure it would be an ass-whipping. Nor do the lovely beasts spin, and so what if they’re not dressed like Solomon in all his splendor? I’d like to see Solomon stand around all day in a blizzard on the Montana plains without calling on the Power of the Lord to keep his dick from snapping off like a popsicle.

But in the end I’ve fallen back on more conventional work that doesn’t require skills such as Comanche evasion and advanced grazing strategies. Because if I were to be completely honest, at some point between the ages of 4 and 20 I realized that not only do buffalo “toil not, neither do they spin,” but also they, “drive not, neither do they have dental care.”

I like experiencing things more than I like hearing about them, with the exception of earthquakes and family dinners. I imagine you do too. Most people prefer to smell and taste a homemade brownie or two rather than hear someone read the list of ingredients on a package of brownie mix. I learned this rule by violating it hundreds of times over years of acting and performing improv. As my audience’s eyes rolled back and they began to strangle on their own spit, I would ask myself, “Don’t they like hearing about the gag gifts at Cousin Skeeter’s birthday party?”

Mark Twain finally convinced me that my audiences hated the birthday party, hated Cousin Skeeter, and hated me. Mr. Twain wrote, “Don’t talk about the old lady screaming. Bring her on and let her scream.” Upon reading that, I decided to do stuff onstage, rather than just talk about stuff. I resolved to take action. This began a period in which I flailed around the stage like a beached halibut as I tried to find things to do. I swept floors, I carried boxes around the stage, and I waved my arms a lot. My audiences found this as fascinating as the re-oxygenation of my blood. They hated my action.

A subsequent thousand years of humiliating failures showed me why my action sucked. My action needed a clear target and a reason to go after it. Action is doing something, true. But it’s also doing something to someone or something for a reason. For example, when the old lady screams, that’s doing something. And when she screams into her sister’s face from a distance of one inch, that’s doing something to someone. But when she’s screaming to communicate outrage because her sister just snatched away her hash pipe, that’s when action is born.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of good dialogue. The words and how they’re said are critical. But come on—old ladies screaming and grabbing drug paraphernalia is entertainment we can all appreciate.

These days I’m working to apply this principle to my writing. I’m astounded by the scope of action I can include in a story. I can incorporate literally cataclysmic events. The closest I ever came to that onstage was me dancing in Oklahoma! But I try to remind myself that the rules of action apply when I’m writing: do something to someone or something for a reason. So when my characters just walk somewhere, that’s not action. Even if they have a reason to walk, the walking itself isn’t being done to someone. If my terrorist releases a plague, but I never show what it does to anyone, that’s not action. Sure, I can say that the plague got released, but my readers don’t get the payoff of “seeing” what was done to the victims. If my hero sharpens his sword just because it’s sword-sharpening time, that’s not action. Any of these things may be fine additions to my story, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that action has just happened. I’m better off fooling myself into thinking that a third brownie is no big deal.

I find action challenging to write, just like I find action challenging to perform onstage. I could say that I struggle with action out of laziness—and that would be true. But I also struggle with it out of fear. Onstage if I talk about someone being a bastard, I can take it back later. I can distance myself. If I slap him because he’s a bastard, that’s harder to take back. I’ve got to commit and be willing to back it up in the rest of the scene.

Trying to write action hits me the same way. When my villain burns down an orphanage, I feel a little more comfortable just describing how my characters heard about the tragedy, and then letting them get on with walking someplace. Then I don’t have to commit to the reality of the action. I don’t have to write about teddy bears on fire, or the villain kicking the escaping orphans back through the flaming doorway into the conflagration.

So, those are my struggles with action, and it kicks my butt pretty often. One would think I’m the dramatic and literary equivalent of a Galapagos Tortoise. But I’ll keep working at it. It should help that I’m building up good artistic karma by never dancing in Oklahoma! again.

An example of action. You should have seen what happened to him 10 seconds later.

 

 

I feel like a jerk for not caring whether Harry Potter lives or dies. He’s such a nice fellow, friendly, self-sacrificing, destined to vanquish the forces of evil, and humble. You couldn’t want a finer friend than Potter. Yet I find myself far more moved by the fate of Groo, that evil, galloping skag from the movie Despicable Me.

I understand why people love Harry, and I’m in no way criticizing them for adoring the world-famous wizard. He has a crew of fascinating and devoted friends who assist him in fighting the evil Voldemort. Groo just has tiny yellow minions who squabble like the Three Stooges and create disasters that make their master look like a dork. True, the tiny minions number in the hundreds. Then again, Harry’s friends seem to number in the hundreds too, especially when you try to keep track of them through all seventeen movies. (I’ll double-check that number later. There might have been eighteen movies.)

Harry Potter’s story spans an impressive scope. We follow him across his teenage years, through the magical and mundane worlds, from hero to criminal and back. He’s as noble as Sir Lancelot, and he bounces back from defeat like Godzilla. Yet my buddy Groo walked on the outer skin of a rocket ship headed roughly towards the moon; that’s impressive, right? Maybe Harry has neat toys like invisibility cloaks and wands and such, but Groo has a couch shaped like an alligator.

Perhaps the virtue, nobility, generosity and cleanliness Harry displays across his entire adolescence have put me off. If he’d gotten drunk one night and slipped a horse into Dumbledore’s study then I could better relate to him. But instead he starts off good and remains good throughout the tale. Groo starts off planning to destroy the world, and he ends up tucking little orphan girls into gutted bombs. That’s character development.

My friends anticipated the release of the final Potter film like boa constrictors dangling above an unwary tourist in the rain forest. Song parodies about Harry Potter are flourishing on the internet. Fans will hold Harry Potter movie marathons to enjoy good fellowship, Dorito-overdoses, and brutal gang fights between would-be Gryffindors and Slytherins. Wholesome fun for everybody. But I just can’t find the Joy of Harry within my soul.

I admire Harry. He’s a great role model. I applaud the people who love him. But to help you understand my ambivalence over Harry’s goodness, I recently wrote a story in which a man chases a wounded, fleeing ruffian, knocks him down, and casually kills him. I asked my wife, “Is this character too cruel to relate to?”

She said, “I’m probably not the best person to ask.” When I persisted, she said, “I’ve been with you for 20 years, so my viewpoint has been affected.”

I pointed out that I’ve never chased down and murdered a helpless person, to which she replied, “But if it were allowed, you know that you’d do it.”

I sincerely hope everyone has a good time at the theater and enjoys all things Harry. You are all fine people. If you want to reach me in the meantime, my friend Groo and I will be hanging out on his alligator-shaped couch.