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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
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Well, I was right when I said it yesterday -- I'm pooped. I stayed up way too late, slept way too little, have way too much to do, and I'm way, way tired. I just sat through two and a half hours of meetings, and I'm afraid to even ask whether we're having our regular Tuesday afternoon powwow. Stick a fork in me, Skippy. I'm cooked.
I'm sitting at lunch now, concentrating on nothing more than keeping my sandwich out of my damned hair. I have to be vigilant, too -- there's a fair chance that I'll slip while taking a bite, or get overzealous wiping my mouth with a napkin, or simply give in and plop my head in the middle of the thing for a nice, relaxing nap. Man, that sounds good. I wonder what kind of dreams I'd have, surrounded by the smell of pickles and banana peppers.
(Hey. Get your mind outta the gutter. I'm tellin' a story here.)
Anyway, the sleep situation doesn't look much better tonight. There's another work meeting at nine in the morning.
(Who are these people? What the hell did I ever do to them?!)
And with all the crap I need to do, I'm likely to be up late again. Not working, necessarily. I might be thinking about work, or avoiding work, or putting off work, or even just stressing about how much work is sitting there not being done. So I'm not likely to be productive, per se, but I'll be awake. Not sleeping, and not working, in a sort of procrastinatinatory insomnial limbo. Welcome to my life, boys and girls. The alcohol's in the cabinet over there; you're probably gonna need it.
What's the driving force behind the unfortunate comeback that sideburns are making lately? Seriously, can somebody tell me, so I can kill whatever it is, and stomp on the carcass?
Is it That Damned 70's Show? The X-Men movies? The clueless boobs in those 'hemi' truck commercials?
There's a guy sitting in front of me right now with big nasty shagburns all the way down to his frickin' chin. He looks like he's wearing carpet remnants on his cheeks, and ugly remnants at that. His hair's thinning on top, too, which makes him look all the more ridiculous.
Maybe he's growing out the 'burns to try some sort of 'comb-up' maneuver; who the hell knows? Whatever he's trying, it's not working, and it's not pretty.
Now, I've never really minded cold weather all that much. I like being a bit cool, and I rarely wear a coat. It's a simple matter of time management -- if I'm going to be in the cold for twelve seconds to get to the car, and then in the car for twenty minutes, back outside for twenty seconds, and back indoors for the next eight hours, then why the hell do I need a coat? If I can just grit my teeth and get through the half a minute that I'm actually in the cold, then I won't have to spend the rest of the day sitting on the coat, or hanging it up, or dropping food on it, or leaving it on a damned bus somewhere. It's simple, really.
But this year is a little different. For one thing, it's our first winter in the hundred-year-old house that we moved into. That's the hundred-year-old house with the forty-year-old heater, by the way. Which means that there's no real guarantee that 'inside' is going to be significantly warmer than 'outside' for the next six months or so.
Granted, we do have a fireplace -- and we just had it cleaned -- but we've had precious little experience in the area of deliberately starting fires. Sure, if you want an accidental brush fire, or a grease fire in the kitchen -- we're your couple. We've even managed to get flames to shoot out the ass of our grill in the back yard.
(I wrote about it somewhere, but I'm too tired to look it up. Just search for 'flames', 'ass' and 'grill' in the search box up there in the upper right. You'll either get the story I'm thinking of, or a description of my spicy jerk chicken. Mmmmm... it's flaming-ass good!)
But the house isn't my only problem this year. You see, my current job has me sharing time at two offices, with no good parking solution at either. So those 'twenty seconds' or so that I usually spend sprinting my freezing ass from car to office and back is more like fifteen minutes. And I'm tough, people, but I'm not that tough. Fifteen minutes in harsh New England conditions could have some consequences and repercussions, if you know what I mean. My nose could go numb, for one thing. My fingers could get frostbitten. My nipples could turn black and fall the fuck off, fer Chrissakes! Now, I don't mind making sacrifices for my job, but the nipples are strictly off limits. I've only got, what -- four or five of the things? I simply can't risk losing any to the elements.
So, maybe I'll have to start wearing a coat, and going through the ridiculous dance of bundling and unbundling, wrapping and unwrapping, layering and unlayering, that most folks go through every winter. Tsk. What a time sink that is. Personally, I'm only interested in 'bundling up' if I'm gonna go play in the snow, and I'm only excited about taking off a bunch of clothes if there's gonna be sex in the near future. The very near future.
(And don't ask what I'd wear to have sex in the snow. In my tuckered-out condition, questions like that could give me a fricking aneurysm.)
It's not that I'm allergic to coffee or anything like that. It doesn't even upset my stomach. Hell, I even like the taste of coffee -- enough to prefer it black and unadulterated. But I haven't been able to drink coffee since high school. Tenth grade, to be exact.
You see, in the tenth grade, I had Social Studies class. And in that class was a teacher. And that teacher was... well, um, actually, I find that I can't actually remember her real name. I can only remember what we called her -- 'Old CBB'. As in, 'Coffee Bean Breath'.
Now, I don't know how many pots this woman went through a day, but the bitch must have bled brown. She had this habit of walking up and down the aisles, between the desks, as she lectured, and it was a hideous, cruel torture, indeed. The smell of day-old rancid coffee just oozed off this woman, like heat waves from sunblasted pavement. We could smell it from three, maybe four seats away. Flowers wilted, lights dimmed... if we'd been a junior high class, we'd have shrieked and screamed in terror. But we were tenth graders, wise in the ways of the world. So we sucked it up and stuck it out. It wasn't easy, but we managed.
On the other hand, I suspect that I'm not the only former pupil in that class to have been turned off coffee forever. It wasn't that it ruined it for me, exactly -- I can still enjoy the smell of a really good, rich pot of boiling joe. But I could never imagine putting other people through the hellish nightmare that I went through in that damned Social Studies class. And I have no idea where the 'threshold of putrescence' is -- how many cups can you have before you start to reek? One? Three? Twelve? And since I don't know, I've just sworn the stuff off. I have plenty of other ways to walk around offending people's senses, without adding 'hot black halitosis' to the list.
But, of course, there's a consequence to my decision. Since I've chosen not to make others suffer, I suffer sometimes myself. Like this morning, when I damned near had to hold my mouth shut with my hands to keep from drooling all over the conference room table. I jammed a pen so far into my palm, quietly trying to will myself awake, that it stuck in there, like a plastic sixth finger.
(Which has it's upside, once you get past the excruciating pain. I know what I'll be picking my nose with for the next few days, for instance.)
In the end, maybe it would be better to just bite the bullet and brew the beans. To admit defeat and take my caffeinated medicine. And under normal circumstances, I might. But goddamn, people -- you have no idea how bad this woman smelled! I've never experienced anything like it; my eyes still water, just at the memory. So I just can't bear to do it -- sleepy or not, even drooling down my shirt, I simply won't perk myself up with coffee. I couldn't. I just... won't. *shudder*
People are always saying, 'Peace out'. It's everywhere. I'm surprised Dan Rather and Penis Jerkings... um, sorry, Peter Jennings (yeah, I'm still kinda proud of that one) don't end their newscasts with that. Walter Cronkite had the street cred to pull it off:
'And that's the way it was, on this twenty-fourth of November, two double-zizzle and three. Word to the mutha, all you pimps and bitches in the hizzouse. Peace out, and have a pleasant tomorrow.'
Or, um, something like that. Anyway, the point is this -- what if 'peace' works like 'time'? You call 'Time out', but then you eventually have to say, 'Time in,' right? Well, we wonder why there are wars and killing and hatred all over the place these days -- what if it's all these numbnuts walking around calling 'Peace out', and nobody picking up the 'Peace in' slack? Did anyone ever think of that?
I think I'm gonna start conversations that way -- hell, I might even start answering the phone with 'Peace in?'.
(Instead of my current greeting, 'Hello, unless you're a fucking dickhead telemarketer'. Which is useful, no doubt -- but it does tend to frighten grandma when she calls up.)
Anyway, maybe there's something to it. Maybe if we all started doing our part with a 'Peace in!' now and again, we'd finally lick this 'world peace thing'. Or maybe I'm just a sleep-deprived drooling moron with pickles in my hair. Whatever. Either way, I'm too tired to do anything about it right now. I'm gonna head back to the office, prop myself up against a wall, and pretend I'm working while I catch up on some naptime. I'll catch up with you folks later. Peace out.
(And... peace back in! Woo! Now didn't that feel good?)
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I hate wearing a coat too.. I'm with you.. the car is heated, so is the indoors, why bundle when I can rush? Of course, now I have three kids and so we do the coat thing. I'm eager for snow though, I'm not native to these parts and don't own a house. Therefore, I'm not sick of snow because I don't have to shovel it. I'll shut up now because I have my own blog to ramble in Just thought I'd drop you a line.. or three or four or six.