Category: Humor

I hate bars. I think it’s because I spent too much time in bars when I was young, doing and saying stupid things. To me, a bar means cigarette smoke, over-priced liquor, and annoying people who like bars. I consider vomiting a deferred benefit. It’s not unheard of for me to wake up the next day with wounds I can’t explain. I once woke up on the floor with some serious back pain, only to find I’d spent the night sleeping on the telephone. It was one of those chunky black phones like you see in old movies. This should give you an idea of how much I hate bars.

I never behaved as stupidly in a bar as I now do on the internet. The parallels between a bar and the internet shocked me when I realized them. I now understand why people become addicted to the internet the same way alcoholics become addicted to whiskey sours. A bar and the internet both contain a core of nice things to appreciate. But they’re encased in a quagmire of life-sucking garbage.

For example, people hang out in bars, and some of those people know that they know everything. They’ll tell you how to incorporate your business for $15. They’ll explain how superconductors work and why Finland is trying to steal our technology. They’ll reveal how the Illuminati have now become Netflix and the company that makes Red Bull. Some people call these guys blowhards. But no one knows whether these people are right about anything, and the only ones who care to correct them are other blowhards. In bars they’re blowhards, but on the internet they’re called Wikipedia.

Occasionally you’ll see a fight in a bar. People lose a little control after the seventh maitai, and they were probably sad or angry when they came into the bar anyway. Usually they argue. Sometimes they yell. Once in a while they shove, kick, or throw things. Everyone who has had a relative killed in a bar fight, raise your hand. I know my hand is up. In a bar, when you see a guy haul off with a beer mug, it’s easy to know you should stay out of that. But on the internet when I see someone post an odd thing, such as how President Obama has lowered cholesterol for people over 55, I may resist saying anything. When another guy argues back that Obama sacrifices chickens in the White House basement, I get sucked in to responding. Then I realize I was a moron, as I sit in the middle of an electronic free range butt-kicking for the next 24 hours.

When I went to bars I generally went to hang out with my friends and drink. Friends and booze made up the content of the experience, as far as I had it planned. My friends were fun, at least until they got drunk. Then they annoyed me. The drinking was fun, at least until I had knocked back a few. Then people annoyed me because they said I was annoying. I just stayed at the bar too long. If I’d had a couple of drinks, told a few dirty jokes, and went home, the bar would have provided me a charming evening. And that’s how I am with the internet. If I would check out a blog or two, chat with my friends, buy battery-powered socks, and then shut the thing off I’d be fine. But no, three hours later I’m watching a video of a bunny rabbit and a kitten riding a tricycle. My IQ has dropped so far I’m drooling and eating paste off my toes.

You know your life has gone to a bad place when you’ve become a regular at a bar. I don’t give a damn about Cheers. When you walk into a dingy, smoke-filled room where people puke on the stools and the sprinklers don’t meet code, it is not good for everybody to know your name. If the bar patrons just assume that you will be there every night, you have gone astray. It’s the same with the internet. My friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, some of whom I despise, absolutely assume that I will visit the internet every day. They expect I will insert an Ethernet cable into one of my veins multiple times a day, so I may appreciate their emails and posts about new recipes, photos from 1988, and obscure political causes. On the internet everybody really does know my name. I’m thinking of creating a new online identity named SlopeBrowVerminLovesYourSister666. Maybe that will bring me some peace.

I recognize the irony of writing this piece, posting it on the internet, and wanting you to read it on the internet. In my defense, I did say that the internet made me stupid. But I didn’t blast internet content any more than I blasted a gin martini. Overdoing it is where I get really stupid. That may be a big rationalization on my part, but in the end I admit there are advantages to the internet. My breath smells better, and I’ve never woken up after a hard night of web surfing to find I’ve been sleeping on my router.

Me after a heavy night of web surfing. Or a heavy night at the bar. Could be either one, really.

I accomplished a lot this weekend, if you count hair growth and peristalsis as accomplishments. If you don’t, then I didn’t make much happen in my part of the world. I’m sure my inert existence even prevented things from happening, as if I were a flabby, slack-jawed black hole reducing the net balance of energy in the universe. In my house we have something called The Whirling Vortex of Lethargy, and for 48 hours I lay at its core, as occasional infrared signals from the TV remote conveyed the only signs that I still lived.

On Friday I read a fantastic book about writing. It’s one of those books that’s so powerful and insightful that it plunges you into a profound depression about the inadequacy of everything you’ve ever written. This is like finding out that despite all your love and nurturing, your children have grown up to be carnival geeks. My weekend writing and editing goals evaporated. Cold air washed unchecked into the front yard beneath my un-weather stripped door. Weeds flourished, dirty laundry lay fallow, and my mom remained uncalled.

Saturday morning I crumple onto my green couch, which is twice as old as any of my friends’ children, and I click on my TV, which is shaped like footlocker and weighs as much as my refrigerator. I flip to a crime drama with 248 episodes available for instant viewing. If Netflix had a graven image, I would happily sacrifice goats to it. By Saturday afternoon I catch my wife, seated on the other end of the couch, giving me sidelong looks of concern usually reserved for the terminally ill. I either pretend I don’t notice, or I smile at her in what might be a reassuring manner, although I wouldn’t bet on it.

By Saturday night I resolve to climb out of this cesspool of pity, right after I find out who’s behind the murder of the genetically altered prostitutes, and whether he gets 25 to life. My cats continue to migrate across me one by one, as if I were an tiny island and they were seals pausing to sleep on their way to the Aleutian feeding grounds. My end of the couch is the perfect place to take a plaster cast of my butt, if someone were so perverse as to want such a thing. My wife goes to bed at an hour appropriate for sane people. I stare at the TV as if Dick Wolf were an electronic Svengali, until I slither into unconsciousness, my face mashed into a couch cushion.

On Sunday my wife has things to do with real people, and while I’m sure I’d be welcome, no one expects me to come along. I bring the TV to life once more. If Netflix had been out of service, I might have wept. Throughout  the morning I witness a panorama of felonies—murders, fraud, sexual assault, drug possession, and more. Somebody has a disturbingly fertile imagination. “Bravo,” I think. I’d never appreciated how entertaining a series with no continuing storyline can be. It’s perfect for someone who’s depressed and inattentive.

My cats no longer come near me by Sunday afternoon. They seem to find my degree of lethargy excessive and unnatural. I realize that I have accomplished something. I’ve demonstrated that I can live for two days on Tostitos, Junior Mints, and Diet Coke. By mid-afternoon the TV presents me with the seventeenth child pornography case of the weekend, and my hand seizes the remote control in a spasm of button-pushing. The TV settles on another series without much continuity between episodes, but this one is about the military. I figure the potential for child pornography investigations is low during assassination missions in Afghanistan, so my hand flops back down, the remote rolling out of it.

My den sinks into dimness on Sunday night, and the loosely organized mass of body parts on the couch is barely recognizable as me. Inside, I’m trying to corral my willpower as I prepare for work on Monday. I’m failing. Then on TV I see a brief exchange between characters:

Girl: Do you think people can change?

Big Guy: No.

[Girl exits]

Small Guy: You really don’t think people can change?

Big Guy: No. But I have seen it happen.

I laugh at this for a while. For some reason this dialogue strikes me as hilarious and great. But not impossibly great. I could see myself writing something like this if I worked hard and took my vitamins. I rewind and look for the screenwriter, and I see it’s a David Mamet script. Well, go Dave. It’s not like I’d compare myself to DM, but maybe I’ve written something in the past that is not repugnant. Later Sunday night I slide a cat out of the way and flip back the bed covers at an appropriate hour for sane people, and I find the lullaby “My stuff’s not repugnant” to be oddly comforting.

I once owned the greatest pickup truck on Earth. It was a three-quarter ton, 4-wheel drive International Harvester pickup the color of vomit. The bumpers had been cut off and replaced with cast iron pipes. That truck could perform any feat of hauling, pulling, or intimidating. They truly do not make trucks like that anymore, since International stopped building them 35 years ago. When my life no longer required a truck, I sold it to a good home, and I haven’t owned a pickup since.

When my wife and I bought a house, I considered buying an old pickup. Home ownership occasionally demands that I buy expensive, heavy stuff and cart it to my house, so a truck might prove handy. But we didn’t have a good place in our garage or driveway to park the thing. I suggested parking it in front of the house. My wife reacted as if I’d suggested we build a satanic temple in the front yard, adorned with fountains of blood and a few impaled babies. No particle of my being had considered that parking a truck out front would be a bad thing. So, I found myself confronted by the fact that I am white trash.

That explains a lot. I’ve spent years in academic and business settings around the country and in other countries. Occasionally I’ve said or done something that caused others to react with surprise or mirth. The phenomenon hasn’t caused me great concern, but I have noted it.

I recently read an article on this topic, written by a sociologist. She wrote about her rural-born mother, who got a job in the big city and was embarrassed at how people reacted to her country ways. The writer observed how she herself had experienced this in the past. But she was no longer ashamed of her origin because she had dropped her accent, and she been in grad school, and she had been socialized into academia. She had eradicated evidence of her origin and had assimilated into her new culture. She now felt less fear that she’d be embarrassed because she failed to blend in. But she still might slip, and that was the burden of her uncouth upbringing.

Speaking as a fellow with some Sociology degrees, let me say that no person on Earth is more pretentious, with less justification, than a student in the process of earning a Sociology degree—or than a low-level Sociology professor pursuing tenure. If we want to live and work in a culture, we should learn it until we can navigate it like a native. We should understand that cultural events exist other than the rodeo. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rodeo. The last time I went to the opera, nobody was selling cotton candy, and that’s hardly a big plus in my book.

I theorize that the “ashamed of our origin” problem stems from childhood. I like willful children. I don’t own one, and I’ll admit that if I did I might feel differently. But I identify with them. When I was one of them I required a lot of guidance and discipline so that I didn’t become a shrieking baboon with sticky fingers and snot on my upper lip. Of course, if I had been forced to attend today’s public schools I would’ve created problems. “Discipline” doesn’t describe what I would require. Alternative schools would be inadequate for me. I would probably end up in a forced labor camp guarded by insane clowns.

But here’s my point. If willful children reach adulthood without being murdered or sent to prison, they’re unlikely to worry about embarrassment or blending in. If they leave home for a fine university or a more cosmopolitan locale, they’ll certainly learn the culture, but they probably won’t hide their past. And any field of endeavor (especially Sociology!) is better off with some members who didn’t all throw spit wads in the same prep school.

In the end, shame over my white trash origin hurts me and also my new-found friends who brim with culture and grace. If they laugh then I laugh with them and show them I don’t care, because confidence is king. And if my paramount concern is to blend in and avoid embarrassment, I should just go back home and chop cotton.

I’m trying out a new process for responding whenever I jump on Facebook and see that someone has posted the most ignorant and misguided crap I’ve ever seen. For example, someone might post:

“Brazilians have cured cancer, and drug companies don’t want you to know! The article at this link reports a Brazilian study where injecting bee pollen under the tongue four times a day cured 90% of the cancer patients! Drug companies are squashing this research so they can rake in billions of dollars in profits while sick people die of cancer. Re-post this if you care!”

In STEP 1 of my process, I imagine writing the response I’d love to write. For example, I might think to myself:

“This kind of half-assed bullshit makes me want to lock you in an iron box and smash it with a tire iron for a week. You’re torturing sick people with false hope because you’re too lazy to think through the unsubstantiated drivel you read and then spew out of your fingers like electronic diarrhea. Shut the hell up already, or I’ll come to your house and paint ‘Too Stupid to Swallow Spit’ on your front door.”

I then indulge in some growling and perhaps I kick something soft and inanimate, like a sack of laundry I’m too lazy to tackle. After which I implement STEP 2. I sit down at my computer and write a response that’s something like the following:

“Your post is misleading. First, the article you linked is posted on www.drug-companies-die-like-dogs.com, so the objectivity is a little suspect there. Second, if you had read further than the first 14 words into the article, you might understand it better. The study wasn’t about bee pollen, it was about a new drug. The researchers just noticed that patients sat by an open window and bees flew in sometimes, so the researchers extrapolated the effects of bee pollen. That means they flat out guessed in the hopes someone would give them more money to do this asinine bee pollen research. This was an early safety trial with 10 patients, and 9 of them weren’t directly killed by the drug, so that’s where the 90% success rate came from. And by the way, even if this crap was re-posted by a million people, it wouldn’t affect anything in the world other than making Facebook noticeably stupider for a few days. On the other hand, your typing and grammar are lovely, so you must not be a complete waste of DNA.”

After typing this response, I immediately delete it un-posted and have a drink, or maybe two.

I follow up with STEP 3. I close my eyes and think to myself, “I could respond to your foolish post, but that means I’ll get notified about comments of outrage for the next two days. That would only be worth it if I cared even a tiny bit about what you thought, or if my response would have any positive impact on the real world. Since neither of those things is true…”

Thus far my process has been working marvelously. And every time I use it, I get a couple of drinks out of the deal.

I spend a lot of time editing right now. I suck at it because I’ve been through the story in question so often I can now no longer see what’s on the page. That’s a literal statement. I can’t see a misplaced comma any better than I could see Blackbeard’s ghost.

A number of friends have stepped in to rescue me as if I was trapped in the Alps and they were particularly intelligent and generous Saint Bernards. One of my friends, Linnea, came through like a champion, providing me with feedback such as, “I don’t like any of your characters.” Now that is the kind of friend every writer needs like a tick needs blood.

Linnea also observed that several hundred insults appear in the story and that no insults are repeated. I don’t have her verbatim comment at hand, but I think the words “cool” and “disturbing” may have been involved. Early in my first draft I realized that my characters were going to insult each other a lot. Possibly that is why Linnea didn’t like them. I challenged myself to come up with a new insult every time, just to keep things fresh for the reader, and for me as well.

Over the subsequent 8 weeks of writing, I realized that I have no reliable process for creating insults. However, I did come to understand a few guidelines. When I needed an insult, those guidelines reduced my insult-generation time to about 5 minutes of staring at my screen, rather than staring at my screen forever without producing any insults.

To create an insult I first have to know what kind of insult I require. The plain old insult is just a derogatory description. It often involves phrases like, “You are…”, “You smell…”, or “Your momma is…” For example:

“Your breath smells like the inside of a wino’s shoe.”

However, sometimes I need an epithet, which is a specialized insult. An epithet descriptively names the insulted party in some way. Famous epithets include “Oscar the Grouch” and “Capitalist Running Dog.” You can see that epithets include a noun (in some cases a proper noun). For example:

“Barrel full of dumbass.”

I’ve found that the loose guidelines below make for fun insults, although you don’t need to use all of them together.

1.  Make sure the insult makes sense in some way. It should be relevant to the insulted party or the situation.

If the insulted party is an oppressive bastard, an insult like “You couldn’t tell fine wine from your mother’s piss,” would just confuse everyone. Something like “Baby-kicking chunk of butt-fungus,” seems more appropriate.

2. Employ alliteration and/or assonance.

Streamlined insults wound more deeply, or at least they sound better. Alliteration gives an insult extra zip. Hard consonants like “B”, “C”, “K”, “P”, and “T” yield especially pleasing results. Contrast this insult for a tall woman, “Telephone pole with breasts,” versus, “Tree trunk with tits.” You can see which one pierces more deeply. With regard to assonance, compare these insults for a shiftless, untrustworthy person: “Lazy, no-good cur,” versus “Ass-dragging jackal.” Assonance can transform a tedious insult into something close to poetry.

3. Build insults with rhythm in mind.

A rhythmic flow of words, as in poetry or song lyrics, makes the insult fly off your tongue. Such insults produce beauty and malevolent venom at the same time. As an example, for a mean-spirited, petty woman consider these insults: “Cruel, fearful vat of goat drool,” vs. “Vindictive, cowardly yak’s twat.” The first one is fine, and it does the job. But the second has a rhythmic flow that makes it a little sweeter on the ears, in my opinion.

I’ll be headed back to my blind and mostly ineffective editing now. I hope that these insights have enabled you to be just a little bit meaner to your characters—or maybe to your friends.

I’d like to round up every manager in every business in America, chain each of them to a clammy, stone wall somewhere, and teach them improv until their eyes bleed. Not only would it be fun for me, but they would thank me once their mind-shattering rage had passed. All of their employees and their bosses would thank me too. I’ll bet I would get presents.

I don’t want them to be funny. No one wants that. People would be less happy with funny managers, if that’s conceivable. But improv isn’t necessarily about being funny. Come see me on stage sometime and I’ll prove that. Improv’s about learning to employ a certain set of skills such as agreeing with your partner when she says you have a cow’s tongue in your pocket. But the most critical, least respected improv skill is… Listening. That’s the one I’d love to help our business leaders get comfy with.

Paul Williams said that some people listen, and other people only wait to talk. Working in business has taught me that some people don’t even wait to talk. In fact, some people don’t just fail to listen, they actively employ defective listening. If you say “cat,” they will hear “catastrophe.” If you say, “European debt,” they will hear, “It’s my fault we’re losing money, sir, and I’m an under-achieving dweeb. Let me pack up my autographed Firefly model and my Dilbert mouse pad before you escort me out.”

You know these managers I’m talking about.

So I propose that a good, healthy round of brutal improv training should take care of this. Some of these managers will cry. Maybe a lot of them. That’s okay, it’s a normal part of the process and will give them empathy when they hand out insane deadlines and take away benefits. Almost all of them will learn to listen and become better managers, when the alternative is dangling by rusty iron manacles until they starve. A few will find they have a talent and love for improv, and they’ll carry away happy, misplaced dreams of glory. And a few idiots will think they’re so good that they hop the next bus to Los Angeles, removing them from the management pool forever.

Everyone wins.

I wrote the end of the middle of a book last night. This is the part where I drink some schnapps and celebrate, because writing the middle of a long story beats me down. When I write the beginning, I crackle with fun and excitement, because it’s all new and anything can happen. When I write the end, I glide in with relief and regret because I see how it all will wrap up, and I know I won’t get to write this story anymore. But when I write the middle, I feel like I’m dragging the African Queen through a leech-filled swamp—which happened in the middle of that story as I recall.

I struggle with the middle because it squats before me in a willfully ill-defined manner. Sometimes I’m tempted to write, “People do stuff here,” repeatedly for 200 pages. This problem plagues even the best writers of books, plays, and films, as the following examples show us:

Hamlet
Beginning – You learn about the characters and Hamlet swears revenge.
Middle – Hamlet does stuff to some people.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys.

Lonesome Dove
Beginning – You learn about the characters and they decide to go to Montana.
Middle – People do stuff while they ride a long way with a lot of cows.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys.

Star Wars (the original episodes)
Beginning – You learn about the characters and Luke learns the ways of the Force.
Middle – People fly through space and do stuff.
End – You have a bunch of dead guys and dancing ewoks.

The middle is an easy place for me to go wrong. I may kill a character that I’ll need later on. The boy and girl may get together too soon, or they may hate each other too much. I may make such a crazy thing happen that my readers become disgusted for the rest of the book. I may write a bunch of meaningless crap because I feel that I have to fill pages.

I may just get outright bored with the whole thing. The temptation to quit the difficult middle of one project and switch to the exciting beginning of something else is like being hooked on literary heroin.

One reason I wrestle so hard with the middle of stories is that I can see the end of the middle of my life, right up there ahead of me. The beginning of your life contains a lot of possibilities. Just like in a story, the middle of your life sees possibilities taken away. That’s just the way a story is—people do stuff in the middle, and that makes it impossible for other stuff to be done. As in my stories, I’d like the rest of the middle of my life not to be a series of “People do stuff here” pages. And I would definitely like to set myself up for an end that includes dancing ewoks.

In my younger days, the process of writing seemed premeditated to me. When I sat down to write, I knew where I wanted to end up. It was a matter of building myself a bridge of words and paragraphs to get there. But I struggled quite a lot in those days. My paragraphs pooled on the page like a pauper’s soup. They lacked detail, imagery, flavor, and anything else smacking of imagination. I wrote each paragraph like it was the next girder in a bridge that would get me across a literary chasm.

I sucked. A lot.

For a good many years now I’ve dabbled with improvisational acting. I can say with soul-riveting certainty that improv is not premeditated. When improvising, thinking ahead is like slamming a tire iron into the left knee of your scene. When you start thinking ahead to what you’ll say 15 seconds from now, then you’re not paying a damn bit of attention to what you’re saying now. That almost guarantees that what you’re saying now is crummy. Also, your fellow improvisers are almost certainly as creative and unpredictable as you. So when they don’t say what you expected, then you’ve just sealed them and yourself in an oily barrel of suck and tossed it into the Sea of Creativity Gone Awry.

Therefore, I learned, “Don’t think ahead, you moron.”

I return now to my writing endeavors, and I realize that my earlier writing resembled crummy improv. I was always thinking about what was coming next and how to get there. I paid little attention to what was happening in the paragraph currently being massaged by my greasy fingers.

For example, say I’m writing a paragraph about getting into an automobile. I know that within a few paragraphs someone will jump up from the back seat and stab my hero. If I focus too much on the stabbing, I may write something like:

“Walt walked up to his odd green sedan and opened the driver’s door. He slid into the seat and grabbed the steering wheel, then he put the key into the ignition and started the car.”

While I’m writing that paragraph, the whole time I’m thinking, “Walt’s getting stabbed soon, Walt’s getting stabbed soon, Walt’s getting stabbed soon…”

I need to convince myself of the fact that Walt has no idea he’ll be stabbed 3 paragraphs from now. So if I can force my lazy brain to stick with Walt in the current paragraph, then it will come out different:

“Walt stalked across the sidewalk to his two-tone green sedan, and he snarled at the bird shit on the windshield. He yanked open the driver’s door and threw himself into the front seat like it was a foxhole. He strangled the wheel with his left hand while he jabbed his key into the ignition after three tries, five curse words, and one nasty reference to his ex-wife’s mother. The engine clattered to life, and Walt reached out to slam shut the driver’s door, never shifting his glare from the street in front of him.”

Walt’s still getting stabbed in less than a page, but I’m giving Walt the attention he deserves until then. And oddly, when I pay attention to the words I’m playing with now, I often find that down the line I end up in slightly different places than I’d originally intended. Sometimes I end up in radically different places. But they’re places I feel better about.

Improv and writing–they’re like peanut butter and chocolate for me.

In January a long-time buddy and I were engaged in crushing the hopes and dreams of creative people. It’s a hobby. We and a number of other well-meaning ruthless shrews were bickering about which people to nurture and which people to crush. I wouldn’t describe the discussion as heated, or even spirited. I’d describe it as discussion with flecks of spit flying through the air. Eventually fairness was raised as an argument. If we nurtured “Creative Person X,” then it would be unfair to crush “Creative Person Kind of Like X.”

My response was, “I refuse to be dictated to by the whims of fairness.” My buddy immediately had to write that down. Not that she agreed with me. I suspect she just wanted to keep it so she can whip it out at my funeral service and show everyone what a dick I was.

In the end we chose not to crush either of those people, and those people went on to convince me that was the right decision. But I stand by my “whims of fairness” position. Fairness is supposed to be a good thing. It’s supposed to be even. It’s supposed to be blind. Well, for most things in life such as swinging on trapeezes, and building bridges, and driving supertankers, blindness is not an asset. If you need a tumor cut out of your brain, do you want to get whatever surgeon is on deck at the hospital that day? “Dr. Xu normally does tonsils and deviated septums, but he’s next up today so here you go!”  No, I suspect you would want the best god damned brain surgeon on earth, or at least the best one your hospital can bribe to work there.

Fairness binds me in an arbitrary standard that takes the decision making out of my hands. I believe in creativity and courage. But fairness is the refuge of the uncreative and the timid.

People hate my philosophy on fairness. It kicks everything they cherish right in the crotch. Therefore, while I dislike fairness I have enormous respect for the perception of fairness. And that perception isn’t tough to create, because in the end people really, deep down, don’t want fairness. Think about it–if everyone got what they deserved, this would be a mighty sad world. When we are heard, and our ideas and needs are acknowledged, and when creative, brave decisions help us succeed collectively and as people–well, we still won’t be happy, because we’re still people and never satisfied. But we’ll be less miserable.

Fairness is a rule. And as Thomas Edison said, “There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something!”