• I’m prone to hyperbole
See above.
• I’m overly polite, maybe
If someone starts telling me a story that requires me to be familiar with something, I can’t help but profess a familiarity with that something even if I’m not remotely familiar. For instance, if someone says to me, “I almost got run off the road this morning on that sharp bend by the creek on Hill Road” and then pauses to ask if I know the spot they’re talking about, I will say yes even if I have no idea. I just can’t say no. I’d like to think it’s because I’m overly polite, but I suspect that it’s because I’m an asshole and I want you to finish telling me your dumbass story so I can go back to daydreaming about Livin’ on a Prayer – the all-clergy Bon Jovi-themed Broadway show I’m producing in my head.
• I’m too dumb to eat
When I was 10 years old, my fifth-grade class went on a field trip to a local nature preserve. One of my classmates brought along fruit roll-ups to share with the class. I’m sure you’ve eaten them (or their R-rated cousin, edible undies) – brightly colored sheets of consumable rubber masquerading as “fruit.” And so you know, as did every other kid in 1985, that they are double wrapped in a thick, paper outer-pouch and a transparent, plastic inner-lining. Well I didn’t. I tore off the outer packaging and bite right in, remarking to my friends that they were “so chewy.” Over the mocking laughter of my classmates I heard our teacher make a crack about natural selection.
• I don’t know my right from my left
I failed my driver’s license test the first time out because when the trooper told me to make a right-hand turn out of the parking lot I hung a left into a maintenance shed where I was immediately greeted by the confused stares of the assembled mechanics – stares that quickly turned to grins and, ultimately, outright laughter and finger pointing. In my defense, the trooper looked and sounded just like Clint Eastwood – I mean, you try keeping your wits about you with Dirty Harry in the passenger seat.
• I’m a drooler
I like sofas and I like naps. And I can sleep anywhere. But people don’t like having their sofa cushions slobbered upon. I can’t say I blame them. Accordingly, many of my friends have banned me from their sofas. Oh, they’ll allow me a seat when the conversation’s lively or the game is in the first half, but when the evening grows long or the game is a blow-out, I’m ordered to the floor. Fair enough.
• I have poor fine motor control
My handwriting is like a child’s – a child with a head injury and a belly full of liquor. I can’t peel back yogurt lids. I can’t shuffle a deck of cards. I can’t undo a bra, probably. I can’t unstick a zipper. I can’t turn on a goddamned lamp if it’s the twisty kind.
• I can be a real asshole if it means winning a costume contest
When I was a freshman in college I sort of let three homosexual guys in my dorm believe that I was gay so that I could be the gay Murdock in their gay A-Team Halloween costume. There was a $100 prize and I knew they were a shoe-in (they even had a black guy to be B.A.). We won the contest, so everybody was happy. Although, Peter (Face) was understandably hurt when he discovered that I had backed-out on being his date to the gay and lesbian student organization’s fall mixer because I had spent that same evening showering my share of the prize money on an exceedingly drunk sorority pledge over at the Parkside Lounge.
• I’m not a strong speller
My dad likes to say that if you spot him the “k” and the “t” he can spell “cat.” I don’t have any poor speller jokes of my own, so I’ll give you a knock-knock joke instead. Knock-knock [who’s there?]. Owl. [Owl who?]. You speak owl? That reminds me….
• I don’t believe in owls
Have you ever seen an owl? An actual owl? In the wild? Not a cleverly costumed hawk on some shyster zoo keepers arm, but an actual mouse-eating, barn-dwelling, 360-degree-head-turning-freak hoot owl? Of course you haven’t. Nobody has. Because they don’t exist.
• I hate ballerinas
And I hated ballerinas long before it was trendy to hate ballerinas. Heck, I’ve been restraining the urge to kick some ballerina ass for over a decade. I hate their whole operation – the leg warmers, the insanely tight hair buns, the eating disorders, the enchanting artistic expression – I hate everything about them. And why do they always travel in packs? I mean, when a bunch of street kids form an alliance to protect themselves and honor their neighborhood it’s called a gang and we put them in jail, but when a group of ballerinas congregate to artfully starve themselves and prance around on crumbling sesamoids, we give them grant money.
• I just lost feeling in my right foot for the fourth time this week and, frankly, I’m just too lazy to do anything about it
Meh.
• I make gift buying a chore
My interests are very specific and mostly illegal. So Christmas can be difficult for those who wish to buy me a gift. Well, not this year. This Christmas, why don’t we just cut the crap and you can buy me a “Who Farted?” t-shirt?
Friday, December 9, 2011
Sunday, June 19, 2011
RON MARTINO IS A WEASEL
A wise person once said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.” While I’m obviously ignoring that principle here, there is, in my defense, precedent for doing so. Actual legal precedent. In the matter of Marriott Resorts and Spas International v. Clifton James & Associates, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania found as follows:
Mr. Martino’s credibility is at best suspect. Even when presented with documents directly contradicting his testimony regarding the time, place and manner in which The Agreement was entered into, Mr. Martino maintains that the Plaintiff never informed him of its decision to remove funds from escrow and return all earnest money to Mr. James. As such, we disregard Mr. Martino’s testimony as it relates to all matters pertinent to our decision. And all that business aside, Ron Martino is pretty much a dick.”
1265 F.Supp 3rd 247-48 (LEXIS 2008).
Okay, the Court didn’t write that last sentence, but you can see what Her Honor was getting at, right?
Ron has one of those vaguely important sounding financial jobs that will occasionally involve him in some gentlemanly litigation. I try my best to appear interested when Ron discusses his work or his great new suit, or his golf outings with “K Street,” or the mediocre draft beer selection in the luxury suites at Lincoln Financial Field, but I usually just end up nodding a lot and thinking about monkeys or Rick Santorum or something else fun. I suppose if the police came to question me in relation to Ron having been kidnapped by Russian mobsters or something and they asked me what Ron did for a living, the best I could do is repeat what I’ve heard Ron say on a number of occasions in response to the same question – “I move money.” Douche.
Ron and I run in the same circles on account of our spouses having struck-up a friendship while breaking choke-holds during morning drop-off at the reasonably priced local daycare center our children attend. Initially, I only had to put up with Ron about five or six times a year at various birthday parties and child-oriented community events. This was fine given my easygoing nature and willingness to drink whatever’s at hand, but when I began to spend more time with Ron I found myself wishing that he would, say, accidentally overdose on being stabbed in the chest. Hence, I led the charge to expel Ron from book club.
Me and my college pal Rodney Weston founded a book club, Rodney’s Readers, about 3 years ago. At school we were both psychology majors who enjoyed wandering over to the English department when Professor John Tyler was teaching something interesting. Not because we particularly enjoyed reading books of great girth, but because Professor Tyler conducted his literature classes in what was once perfectly described by a fellow English professor on an unfortunately leaked faculty evaluation form as “the same business-like manner in which a nymphomaniac makes love – hard, fast and seemingly without joy.” Rodney and I found Professor Tyler’s style to be highly refreshing at a school in which the faculty was chiefly populated by overly sensitive, self-important blowhards who reveled in the sound of their own voices.
John Tyler was among that ideal class of American men formed only in the 1920’s and 30’s. Men who quashed fascism, earned advanced degrees at prestigious universities, journeyed to the moon and changed their own goddam oil, thank you very much. Men like John Glenn, Ralph Nadar and Robert McNamara (Ron would probably add Ronald Reagan to that list – douche). Professor Tyler died in his study in the fall of 2009. His grave marker reads, “This could be you someday.”
Divorced three times, Professor Tyler was hardly perfect, but what he lacked in domestic charm he more than made up for in dedication to his craft. His craft being, evidently, the absolute mastery of whatever he happened to be interested in at the time. I understand that for most of his adult life a typical morning for Professor Tyler would include rising before dawn, catching his breakfast in the stream that ran behind his property, editing a scholarly article, fitting a few fresh stones into his barn’s perpetually crumbling foundation and then, you know, heading off to work. And later, after their parents passed away, he took in his older brother Robert, who required constant care on account of his having been kicked in the head by a plow horse as a very young boy growing up on the family’s farm (in true Professor Tyler form, he refused to acknowledge any of the modern semantic niceties and simply referred to his brother as a “retarded person”). Even after being named poet laureate of the State of West Virginia and the college’s Honorary James T. and Katherine H. McDowell Chair of Literary Arts, the heading on Professor Tyler’s stationary remained the same: “John Tyler, P.O. Box 41, Campbelltown, W.Va., 26079, 829-3205.
Unfortunately, I only had the pleasure of knowing Professor Tyler in his later years, when his manic pace slowed to an almost mortal tempo. Instead of riding his 1960’s era Schwinn to campus every morning, he drove a painfully practical Geo Metro. Instead of heading into Pittsburgh several times a year to take in a performance at Heinz Hall, he would stream the live broadcast to his computer (it won’t surprise you that he never owned a computer that he didn’t himself build). Instead of chairing the English department, running twenty miles per week and managing the local soup kitchen, he begrudgingly ascended to emeritus status, coached the cross-country team and cooked for the local meals-on-wheels.
Because he no longer taught a full class load, Professor Tyler enjoyed organizing single-credit book groups. These groups were extremely popular, due in part to the flexible schedule (group members chose the meeting time and place) and exceedingly simple structure. Professor Tyler’s book groups famously had only two rules: 1) Read the book; and, 2) Don’t be an idiot. No grades; pass fail.
And so at the inaugural meeting of Rodney’s Readers, we informed the group, including Ron, of these two simple rules. Most followed them with little trouble and if they breached the first, simply brought a decent bottle of liquor or two and quietly mixed cocktails while the others discussed the book. Although I imagine Professor Tyler saw little ambiguity in it, the second rule of book club is, admittedly, somewhat subjective. However, because the members of our group, while not a particularly scholarly lot, generally possessed a good bit of intellectual curiosity, we managed just fine for the most part. Ron, of course, comprised the other part, as it were.
At the second meeting, the topic of which was Steven King’s “Delores Claiborne,” Ron readily admitted that he had not read the book, but offered that he had seen the film. We referred Ron to Rule 1. He wasn’t concerned. Rather, he started in on a fifteen minute lecture regarding the “doability” of the film’s star, Jennifer Jason Leigh (a solid 8.5 out of 10 on the Ron Martino Doability Index, as it turns out) and the tragedy of co-star Kathy Bates’ naked hot-tub scene with “Jack Nicklaus” in the film, “About Schmidt” (a “negative kazillion” on the RMDI). We referred Ron to Rule 2. He laughed.
Now, Rodney’s Readers are surely not above a little sophomoric banter (I can make Rodney snort whatever he’s drinking just by looking at him and shouting “chowder pump” in a Boston accent), but we’re also adults – adults with kids and jobs and wives who grant us precious little time to gather, have a couple cocktails and clear the cobwebs from the deeper recesses of our right brains. So by the fifth meeting – the one where Ron insisted that he had read “Goodbye Columbus” even though he was obviously unaware the protagonist was Jewish and so, as if to make up for it, proceeded to explain that a good number of the Jews he works with are not, in fact, great with money – we were seriously contemplating disbanding the group.
The last straw arrived in the form of Ron’s steadfast objection to coughing up the $50 in dues each member was asked to pay to cover the cost of books purchased in bulk so as to receive a discount. Ron reasoned that because he was promising to bring the group some expensive Cuban cigars that he would purchase on his next, as yet unscheduled, trip to Toronto he shouldn’t have to pay dues. Then he actually argued that, at the very least, his dues should be reduced on account of his not having read most of the books. Douche weasel.
Eventually, Rodney and I decided that it would be an affront to the memory of Professor Tyler to let Ron ruin the group. So it was decided that at the next meeting we would tell Ron that he was out. If he objected, we would cite the Rules of book club. If he cried, well, Rodney is a licensed therapist, so….
As it turns out, Ron left the group of his own volition when he took a job with some firm in Baltimore and, without a trace of irony, reasoned that his 90-minute commute would leave him without time to read the books. We wished Ron well and pretended to be excited when he assured us that he would still have us all over to his house for a dip in the new pool that he was definitely putting in this summer. I’m sure now that Ron is out of the book club our dealings with each other will be much more pleasant. And I do feel a bit guilty for losing patience with him. After all, I’m certainly not perfect. In fact, my shortcomings are many – and hilarious.
Mr. Martino’s credibility is at best suspect. Even when presented with documents directly contradicting his testimony regarding the time, place and manner in which The Agreement was entered into, Mr. Martino maintains that the Plaintiff never informed him of its decision to remove funds from escrow and return all earnest money to Mr. James. As such, we disregard Mr. Martino’s testimony as it relates to all matters pertinent to our decision. And all that business aside, Ron Martino is pretty much a dick.”
1265 F.Supp 3rd 247-48 (LEXIS 2008).
Okay, the Court didn’t write that last sentence, but you can see what Her Honor was getting at, right?
Ron has one of those vaguely important sounding financial jobs that will occasionally involve him in some gentlemanly litigation. I try my best to appear interested when Ron discusses his work or his great new suit, or his golf outings with “K Street,” or the mediocre draft beer selection in the luxury suites at Lincoln Financial Field, but I usually just end up nodding a lot and thinking about monkeys or Rick Santorum or something else fun. I suppose if the police came to question me in relation to Ron having been kidnapped by Russian mobsters or something and they asked me what Ron did for a living, the best I could do is repeat what I’ve heard Ron say on a number of occasions in response to the same question – “I move money.” Douche.
Ron and I run in the same circles on account of our spouses having struck-up a friendship while breaking choke-holds during morning drop-off at the reasonably priced local daycare center our children attend. Initially, I only had to put up with Ron about five or six times a year at various birthday parties and child-oriented community events. This was fine given my easygoing nature and willingness to drink whatever’s at hand, but when I began to spend more time with Ron I found myself wishing that he would, say, accidentally overdose on being stabbed in the chest. Hence, I led the charge to expel Ron from book club.
Me and my college pal Rodney Weston founded a book club, Rodney’s Readers, about 3 years ago. At school we were both psychology majors who enjoyed wandering over to the English department when Professor John Tyler was teaching something interesting. Not because we particularly enjoyed reading books of great girth, but because Professor Tyler conducted his literature classes in what was once perfectly described by a fellow English professor on an unfortunately leaked faculty evaluation form as “the same business-like manner in which a nymphomaniac makes love – hard, fast and seemingly without joy.” Rodney and I found Professor Tyler’s style to be highly refreshing at a school in which the faculty was chiefly populated by overly sensitive, self-important blowhards who reveled in the sound of their own voices.
John Tyler was among that ideal class of American men formed only in the 1920’s and 30’s. Men who quashed fascism, earned advanced degrees at prestigious universities, journeyed to the moon and changed their own goddam oil, thank you very much. Men like John Glenn, Ralph Nadar and Robert McNamara (Ron would probably add Ronald Reagan to that list – douche). Professor Tyler died in his study in the fall of 2009. His grave marker reads, “This could be you someday.”
Divorced three times, Professor Tyler was hardly perfect, but what he lacked in domestic charm he more than made up for in dedication to his craft. His craft being, evidently, the absolute mastery of whatever he happened to be interested in at the time. I understand that for most of his adult life a typical morning for Professor Tyler would include rising before dawn, catching his breakfast in the stream that ran behind his property, editing a scholarly article, fitting a few fresh stones into his barn’s perpetually crumbling foundation and then, you know, heading off to work. And later, after their parents passed away, he took in his older brother Robert, who required constant care on account of his having been kicked in the head by a plow horse as a very young boy growing up on the family’s farm (in true Professor Tyler form, he refused to acknowledge any of the modern semantic niceties and simply referred to his brother as a “retarded person”). Even after being named poet laureate of the State of West Virginia and the college’s Honorary James T. and Katherine H. McDowell Chair of Literary Arts, the heading on Professor Tyler’s stationary remained the same: “John Tyler, P.O. Box 41, Campbelltown, W.Va., 26079, 829-3205.
Unfortunately, I only had the pleasure of knowing Professor Tyler in his later years, when his manic pace slowed to an almost mortal tempo. Instead of riding his 1960’s era Schwinn to campus every morning, he drove a painfully practical Geo Metro. Instead of heading into Pittsburgh several times a year to take in a performance at Heinz Hall, he would stream the live broadcast to his computer (it won’t surprise you that he never owned a computer that he didn’t himself build). Instead of chairing the English department, running twenty miles per week and managing the local soup kitchen, he begrudgingly ascended to emeritus status, coached the cross-country team and cooked for the local meals-on-wheels.
Because he no longer taught a full class load, Professor Tyler enjoyed organizing single-credit book groups. These groups were extremely popular, due in part to the flexible schedule (group members chose the meeting time and place) and exceedingly simple structure. Professor Tyler’s book groups famously had only two rules: 1) Read the book; and, 2) Don’t be an idiot. No grades; pass fail.
And so at the inaugural meeting of Rodney’s Readers, we informed the group, including Ron, of these two simple rules. Most followed them with little trouble and if they breached the first, simply brought a decent bottle of liquor or two and quietly mixed cocktails while the others discussed the book. Although I imagine Professor Tyler saw little ambiguity in it, the second rule of book club is, admittedly, somewhat subjective. However, because the members of our group, while not a particularly scholarly lot, generally possessed a good bit of intellectual curiosity, we managed just fine for the most part. Ron, of course, comprised the other part, as it were.
At the second meeting, the topic of which was Steven King’s “Delores Claiborne,” Ron readily admitted that he had not read the book, but offered that he had seen the film. We referred Ron to Rule 1. He wasn’t concerned. Rather, he started in on a fifteen minute lecture regarding the “doability” of the film’s star, Jennifer Jason Leigh (a solid 8.5 out of 10 on the Ron Martino Doability Index, as it turns out) and the tragedy of co-star Kathy Bates’ naked hot-tub scene with “Jack Nicklaus” in the film, “About Schmidt” (a “negative kazillion” on the RMDI). We referred Ron to Rule 2. He laughed.
Now, Rodney’s Readers are surely not above a little sophomoric banter (I can make Rodney snort whatever he’s drinking just by looking at him and shouting “chowder pump” in a Boston accent), but we’re also adults – adults with kids and jobs and wives who grant us precious little time to gather, have a couple cocktails and clear the cobwebs from the deeper recesses of our right brains. So by the fifth meeting – the one where Ron insisted that he had read “Goodbye Columbus” even though he was obviously unaware the protagonist was Jewish and so, as if to make up for it, proceeded to explain that a good number of the Jews he works with are not, in fact, great with money – we were seriously contemplating disbanding the group.
The last straw arrived in the form of Ron’s steadfast objection to coughing up the $50 in dues each member was asked to pay to cover the cost of books purchased in bulk so as to receive a discount. Ron reasoned that because he was promising to bring the group some expensive Cuban cigars that he would purchase on his next, as yet unscheduled, trip to Toronto he shouldn’t have to pay dues. Then he actually argued that, at the very least, his dues should be reduced on account of his not having read most of the books. Douche weasel.
Eventually, Rodney and I decided that it would be an affront to the memory of Professor Tyler to let Ron ruin the group. So it was decided that at the next meeting we would tell Ron that he was out. If he objected, we would cite the Rules of book club. If he cried, well, Rodney is a licensed therapist, so….
As it turns out, Ron left the group of his own volition when he took a job with some firm in Baltimore and, without a trace of irony, reasoned that his 90-minute commute would leave him without time to read the books. We wished Ron well and pretended to be excited when he assured us that he would still have us all over to his house for a dip in the new pool that he was definitely putting in this summer. I’m sure now that Ron is out of the book club our dealings with each other will be much more pleasant. And I do feel a bit guilty for losing patience with him. After all, I’m certainly not perfect. In fact, my shortcomings are many – and hilarious.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
I Was Once Bitten on the Face by a Woodchuck
The offending rodent belonged to my friend Alex. We were in college at the time and Alex thought it would be fun to keep a pet; specifically, a claret-tinged groundhog his brother Todd claimed to have liberated from the farm where Punxsutawney Phil lives. In reality, Todd had nicked the poor critter with his pick-up truck and, being in the Buddhist phase of his Protestant-college-kid-kicking-the-tires-on-the-rainbow-of-world-religions tour, understood that he was spiritually obliged to nurse the thing back to health and make it his constant companion until such time as the woodchuck could save his life, thereby settling its cosmic debt (Todd’s knowledge of the Buddhist faith was entirely contained in a pamphlet handed to him during a Beastie Boys performance at a Free Tibet concert). In any event, Todd quickly tired of the critter when he realized that it could not be trained to fetch his sandals, pee outdoors or generally refrain from biting anything unfortunate enough to wander within three feet of its quivering snout. So he offered it to Alex.
When Alex raised the idea of accepting Gretchen (Todd named it Gretchen – Gretchen wasn’t impressed) I initially suggested that we consider purchasing a couple of rats instead. Alex, however, believed that rats would scare the girls away. I wasn’t sure who these girls were and why they would have so thoroughly avoided our quarters in the aptly named Crummy Hall until we happened to acquire a pet rat, but Alex was very much a cup-half-full kind of guy.
While I generally shared Alex’s desire for fuzzy companionship, I was given pause by my assumption that a woodchuck would likely require, you know, attention and stuff. Unfortunately, Alex was not to be depended on. Some extol God, country and family, in some order, as principles of paramount worth. Alex revered couch, ganja, and Hot Pockets in exactly that order.
In the end, however, Alex was just so adorably smitten with the notion of sparing Gretchen a trip to the woodchuck-pound or wherever, that I eventually relented, accepting that it would be unwise to come between a man and his Readily Attainable Destiny. RAD, you see, is the destiny that finds you – not the other way around. It’s easy.
Not to be confused with that whole The Alchemist type destiny requiring great patience and persistence to discover, RAD is the Waffle House of the cosmos – its right there. And not merely a spiritualizing of simple stereotypes, RAD is very specific. For example, one who marries in a church, sires toe-headed offspring and purchases a single family home on or near a cul-de-sac, will undoubtedly one day find oneself driving off the lot in a brand new minivan, wondering if the seat-back entertainment system is covered under the 10 year/100,000 mile power-train warranty. It just happens. That’s RAD.
One who plays high school lacrosse, drives mom’s old Jeep Cherokee, breaks-up with Taylor the summer before enrolling at a private liberal arts college and then spends the entire subsequent September wondering what the hell makes Coors “the banquet beer,” will assuredly attend at least seven Dave Matthews Band concerts. That’s RAD.
The wildly narcissistic homosexual fitness enthusiast will eventually cut off a pair of blue jeans above the pocket linings, purchase a snake and cruise around the arts festival on a pair of roller blades, wearing only said cut-offs and snake. That’s totally RAD.
And so it was that Alex – young, lazy, marijuana smoking, microwavable snack craving Alex - was destined to own an imprudently domesticated twenty pound rodent. RAD.
To say that life with Gretchen was at all pleasant would be like claiming that the Pittsburgh Pirates are a Major League Baseball team – a dirty, bald-faced lie. Alex and I, of course, loved the attention that came with being “the dudes who keep a freaking groundhog chained to the bike rack out behind Crummy Hall.” And we surely didn’t mind when the hippie chicks from the outdoors club brought over some of their compost for Gretchen to snack on. But, in spite of our most half-assed efforts, we just couldn’t change the fact that Gretchen naturally loathed human beings.
So it was hardly surprising that one morning while tying my shoes outside the ground-floor window Alex and I used as our principle means of ingress and egress, Gretchen waddled over and bit me on the face. I wasn’t even mad. Sure, it hurt like hell, but I clearly understood the message Gretchen was attempting to convey: “look asshole, you know better than to keep a goddamned woodchuck leashed-up outside this hell hole of a dorm. Oh, and don’t go and do something really stupid like attend law school.” Without even pausing to dress my wound, I retrieved my dullest pocket knife and cut Gretchen’s leash, hoping that Alex would believe that she had finally managed to gnaw her way to freedom (Alex had discovered extacy by that time, so he was hardly troubled).
I still think about Gretchen from time to time and I know that Alex does too. In fact, he and Todd decided to name their newest bar in Fort Lauderdale (RAD) The Drunken Woodchuck. Yes, Gretchen was a fine woodchuck. In fact, I consider her to be the finest rodent I’ve ever known. A shit-ton better than that weasel Ron Martino, anyway.
When Alex raised the idea of accepting Gretchen (Todd named it Gretchen – Gretchen wasn’t impressed) I initially suggested that we consider purchasing a couple of rats instead. Alex, however, believed that rats would scare the girls away. I wasn’t sure who these girls were and why they would have so thoroughly avoided our quarters in the aptly named Crummy Hall until we happened to acquire a pet rat, but Alex was very much a cup-half-full kind of guy.
While I generally shared Alex’s desire for fuzzy companionship, I was given pause by my assumption that a woodchuck would likely require, you know, attention and stuff. Unfortunately, Alex was not to be depended on. Some extol God, country and family, in some order, as principles of paramount worth. Alex revered couch, ganja, and Hot Pockets in exactly that order.
In the end, however, Alex was just so adorably smitten with the notion of sparing Gretchen a trip to the woodchuck-pound or wherever, that I eventually relented, accepting that it would be unwise to come between a man and his Readily Attainable Destiny. RAD, you see, is the destiny that finds you – not the other way around. It’s easy.
Not to be confused with that whole The Alchemist type destiny requiring great patience and persistence to discover, RAD is the Waffle House of the cosmos – its right there. And not merely a spiritualizing of simple stereotypes, RAD is very specific. For example, one who marries in a church, sires toe-headed offspring and purchases a single family home on or near a cul-de-sac, will undoubtedly one day find oneself driving off the lot in a brand new minivan, wondering if the seat-back entertainment system is covered under the 10 year/100,000 mile power-train warranty. It just happens. That’s RAD.
One who plays high school lacrosse, drives mom’s old Jeep Cherokee, breaks-up with Taylor the summer before enrolling at a private liberal arts college and then spends the entire subsequent September wondering what the hell makes Coors “the banquet beer,” will assuredly attend at least seven Dave Matthews Band concerts. That’s RAD.
The wildly narcissistic homosexual fitness enthusiast will eventually cut off a pair of blue jeans above the pocket linings, purchase a snake and cruise around the arts festival on a pair of roller blades, wearing only said cut-offs and snake. That’s totally RAD.
And so it was that Alex – young, lazy, marijuana smoking, microwavable snack craving Alex - was destined to own an imprudently domesticated twenty pound rodent. RAD.
To say that life with Gretchen was at all pleasant would be like claiming that the Pittsburgh Pirates are a Major League Baseball team – a dirty, bald-faced lie. Alex and I, of course, loved the attention that came with being “the dudes who keep a freaking groundhog chained to the bike rack out behind Crummy Hall.” And we surely didn’t mind when the hippie chicks from the outdoors club brought over some of their compost for Gretchen to snack on. But, in spite of our most half-assed efforts, we just couldn’t change the fact that Gretchen naturally loathed human beings.
So it was hardly surprising that one morning while tying my shoes outside the ground-floor window Alex and I used as our principle means of ingress and egress, Gretchen waddled over and bit me on the face. I wasn’t even mad. Sure, it hurt like hell, but I clearly understood the message Gretchen was attempting to convey: “look asshole, you know better than to keep a goddamned woodchuck leashed-up outside this hell hole of a dorm. Oh, and don’t go and do something really stupid like attend law school.” Without even pausing to dress my wound, I retrieved my dullest pocket knife and cut Gretchen’s leash, hoping that Alex would believe that she had finally managed to gnaw her way to freedom (Alex had discovered extacy by that time, so he was hardly troubled).
I still think about Gretchen from time to time and I know that Alex does too. In fact, he and Todd decided to name their newest bar in Fort Lauderdale (RAD) The Drunken Woodchuck. Yes, Gretchen was a fine woodchuck. In fact, I consider her to be the finest rodent I’ve ever known. A shit-ton better than that weasel Ron Martino, anyway.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Writing is Hard
I don't know why so many people try it, frankly. It’s solitary, tedious and sweaty. Worst of all, it's not particularly rewarding. Oh, I suppose if you're really important or famous or sleeping with some really important famous person you could make a tidy sum by churning out a well-timed biography. But writing, for the most part, is like voting - pointless.
Sure, people will argue that there's more to the literary arts than big advances and book tour groupies, but people are assholes. And so are the authors we celebrate most. Shakespeare? Had gonorrhea (I have no idea). Hemmingway? Six-toed cat fetish (close, right?). Wordsworth? I'll tell you what a word is worth - squat. Yesir, anyway you slice it, writing is a dead end.
That's why I'm going to quit. Right now. No more reaching for the old thesaurus, pondering phrases or even cutting and pasting from the internet. Nope. No more having to listen to all those half-hearted “I really enjoyed that, um, thingy you wrote” from friends and family. I'm retiring.
Of course I’ll have to keep up my correspondence. I owe Leonard that much. Leonard is my pen-nemesis, with whom I became acquainted via an ad in the January 1996 issue of Mid-Atlantic Woodcarver. It read, “Seeking thick-skinned, erudite chap with whom to trade trenchant invectives by mail – no Irish.” How could I resist?
Now, I don’t know the first thing about Leonard (other than his address, of course), but over the last 14 years he and I have bluntly affronted every conveniently imagined personality trait we find most despicable in the other. For my part, I’ve decided Leonard to be a Limbaugh Republican who drives in the left lane, chews with his mouth open and sings in the band Nickelback. From what I can gather, Leonard imagines me to be an undocumented alien who enjoys making conversation at urinals and undressing people’s daughters with his eyes.
Frankly, I don’t think I could rise each morning absent the sweet anticipation of Leonard’s vitriolic missives. And I surely couldn’t suffer the indignities of a typical workday unless I was sure that I could pin them all on that dick-face Leonard. So I’ll limit my writing to cathartically berating Leonard and that’s it. Done and done.
Not that I’m prone to sentimentality, but before I hang up my pen I think it might be appropriate to briefly appraise the highlights of my writing career. Won’t you join me?
I first distinguished myself at the age of six, when, completely unprompted, I composed a most thoughtful letter to President Reagan upon his having been shot by that Brady guy (Bill, I think. He was dating Jody Foster). "Git well son" it read, next to a drawing of The Gipper in a Superman outfit. A handwritten response on official White House letterhead soon arrived. "Thank you for your kind letter," the President wrote. Actually, I’ll bet that he wrote something like "monkey dike harpsichord" but Nancy or James Baker or somebody cleaned it up in the final draft.
Two years later, in the midst of a multiplication-table induced rage, I passionately carved the phrase "fart attack” into my desk top. Our teacher, Ms. Jennings, was understandably upset, but I knew even then that it was only because she was sleeping with the janitor whose task it would be to delete my etching.
My final splash in the literary pool came in the fifth-grade (I'm 34 now), when I wrote my Uncle Bernard in Florida as part of a letter-writing exercise. I nailed the greeting ("Deer Uncle Bernard") and the salutation ("Your's...Stan"). Sure, the body of the letter was merely a line-by-line transcription of the first page of the index to our science text, but my Uncle and I had always related in a very cold, literal way.
So that's it, really. The intervening years have been filled with equal amounts hard work and rejection. Rejection of manuscripts, plays, screenplays, poems and pick-up lines. Not that I'm bitter. After all, it’s better to have tried and failed than to have been bitten on the face by a goddamned woodchuck.
Sure, people will argue that there's more to the literary arts than big advances and book tour groupies, but people are assholes. And so are the authors we celebrate most. Shakespeare? Had gonorrhea (I have no idea). Hemmingway? Six-toed cat fetish (close, right?). Wordsworth? I'll tell you what a word is worth - squat. Yesir, anyway you slice it, writing is a dead end.
That's why I'm going to quit. Right now. No more reaching for the old thesaurus, pondering phrases or even cutting and pasting from the internet. Nope. No more having to listen to all those half-hearted “I really enjoyed that, um, thingy you wrote” from friends and family. I'm retiring.
Of course I’ll have to keep up my correspondence. I owe Leonard that much. Leonard is my pen-nemesis, with whom I became acquainted via an ad in the January 1996 issue of Mid-Atlantic Woodcarver. It read, “Seeking thick-skinned, erudite chap with whom to trade trenchant invectives by mail – no Irish.” How could I resist?
Now, I don’t know the first thing about Leonard (other than his address, of course), but over the last 14 years he and I have bluntly affronted every conveniently imagined personality trait we find most despicable in the other. For my part, I’ve decided Leonard to be a Limbaugh Republican who drives in the left lane, chews with his mouth open and sings in the band Nickelback. From what I can gather, Leonard imagines me to be an undocumented alien who enjoys making conversation at urinals and undressing people’s daughters with his eyes.
Frankly, I don’t think I could rise each morning absent the sweet anticipation of Leonard’s vitriolic missives. And I surely couldn’t suffer the indignities of a typical workday unless I was sure that I could pin them all on that dick-face Leonard. So I’ll limit my writing to cathartically berating Leonard and that’s it. Done and done.
Not that I’m prone to sentimentality, but before I hang up my pen I think it might be appropriate to briefly appraise the highlights of my writing career. Won’t you join me?
I first distinguished myself at the age of six, when, completely unprompted, I composed a most thoughtful letter to President Reagan upon his having been shot by that Brady guy (Bill, I think. He was dating Jody Foster). "Git well son" it read, next to a drawing of The Gipper in a Superman outfit. A handwritten response on official White House letterhead soon arrived. "Thank you for your kind letter," the President wrote. Actually, I’ll bet that he wrote something like "monkey dike harpsichord" but Nancy or James Baker or somebody cleaned it up in the final draft.
Two years later, in the midst of a multiplication-table induced rage, I passionately carved the phrase "fart attack” into my desk top. Our teacher, Ms. Jennings, was understandably upset, but I knew even then that it was only because she was sleeping with the janitor whose task it would be to delete my etching.
My final splash in the literary pool came in the fifth-grade (I'm 34 now), when I wrote my Uncle Bernard in Florida as part of a letter-writing exercise. I nailed the greeting ("Deer Uncle Bernard") and the salutation ("Your's...Stan"). Sure, the body of the letter was merely a line-by-line transcription of the first page of the index to our science text, but my Uncle and I had always related in a very cold, literal way.
So that's it, really. The intervening years have been filled with equal amounts hard work and rejection. Rejection of manuscripts, plays, screenplays, poems and pick-up lines. Not that I'm bitter. After all, it’s better to have tried and failed than to have been bitten on the face by a goddamned woodchuck.
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