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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
The missus and I have been in Maine for two-and-a-half days now. As our sojourn rolls merrily along, I’m learning a lot. About the state. About myself. And about granite. Let’s review, shall we?
Yes. Let’s.
1. I mentioned earlier that we arrived a smidge after 9:00 in the evening on Friday, and the local restaurants were all closed for the night. I secretly hoped — because it was kind of a dumb thing to hope publicly — that it was just some kind of Friday night phenomenon, or localized to just the little town near the place where we’re staying.
Hardly. It’s as difficult to buy a lobster roll after 9pm here as it is to buy a beer before noon in Boston, home of one of the most savagely Puritanical sets of ‘blue laws‘ around. You’d think crustaceans were a controlled substance or something.
2. Happily, the beer laws here mostly make up for niggling food issues. We bought a six-pack at a quarter til ten at night, and I had Guinness with an early lunch yesterday. Fat, drunk and starving is some way to go through life, son. According to Maine, apparently.
“Some toilets can’t take a joke, apparently.”
3. I mentioned yesterday that the toilet seat was smaller than most. Ten minutes later, the stupid thing clogged and it took me an hour to get it working properly again.
Moral: Don’t screw around with plumbing fixtures before you get to know them. Some toilets can’t take a joke, apparently.
4. Yesterday, we walked to the end of a nearly mile-long breakwater made from big irregularly-shaped blocks of granite, with jagged cracks between.
Why did we do this? The reasons are unclear, even now. I was told it would be ‘scenic’, but with the uneven blocks and cracks and fresh seagull plop everywhere, the only thing I ‘scened’ was the ground two feet in front of me. I haven’t stared at my own shoes for that long since junior prom.
5. At one point yesterday, my wife looked over and loudly exclaimed:
‘Hey! Have we seen three lighthouses, all in one day?‘
I told her to keep her voice down. Because we had. And I was afraid the jealous people around would want to kill us for our rock-star lifestyle. I mean, three lighthouses?
This is just the kind of wanton American excess the rest of the world hates us for. My apologies to those of you living in a one-lighthouse-per-day or two-lighthouse-per-day world. We’ll do our best not to lord it over you.
Until next time, at least. For now, I’m going to go make up with the toilet. Maybe if I flush some flowers and a box of chocolates down it, it’ll behave for the remainder of the trip.
Permalink | 2 CommentsAs promised / threatened on Friday, I’ll be squawking a bit less while the missus and I are enjoying a long anniversary weekend in Maine. I’ve never been this far north, and haven’t been in the state for a few years. I realize we’re not seeing all that Maine has to offer — or really, very much of it, since the goal is to have as lazy and relaxing a weekend as possible. That said, I’ve drawn a few conclusions. In other words:
“I think I saw a chipmunk. But it might have been a leaf. Or a rock. I didn’t have my binoculars in hand to verify. Also, I was a little drunk.”
Things That I Feel I Can Safely Extrapolate About the State of Maine, Based on One Night in Our Hotel Room:
1. Based on the view (pointed toward some pretty but unpronounceable bay), Maine — like humans, light beer and most of the rest of the Earth — is roughly ninety percent water. The rest is a thicket of trees and dark wooded islands stretching off to the horizon.
2. So if I’m not drowned or eaten by a coldwater shark, the bears and moose are going to get me. Or Dr. Moreau.
3. No actual bears, moose, sharks or mad scientists have been witnessed from the room — yet. I think I saw a chipmunk. But it might have been a leaf. Or a rock. I didn’t have my binoculars in hand to verify. Also, I was a little drunk.
4. Based on the toilet seat, people in Maine have backsides about twenty percent smaller than the typical American ass. The chairs appear to be normal-sized; maybe they sit in them two and three at a time, for fun. Or to huddle for safety, when the sharks are prowling.
5. Privacy is also not a concern in Maine. They have window blinds, but you can’t pull them down. Rather, you can pull them down, and then they smugly roll up to the top again as though you’ve offended their honor in yanking them toward the floor. Which is a natural reaction, I suppose. I just didn’t expect it from a window treatment.
6. I can only assume that these “Maine blinds” lead to all sorts of wacky adventures, neighborly drama, and the development of the friendly, close-knit society that I understand is present throughout the state of Maine. There are no secrets here, and they seem to accept that.
7. I’m now going to spend the rest of the week trying to avoid showing my junk to the chipmunk when I get out of the shower.
8. And not getting eaten, drowned, or experimented on. And practicing a new sport I’ve invented called ‘precision pooping’. Yay, Maine.
Permalink | No CommentsThe updates here may be short and proverbially-though-probably-not-actually ‘sweet’ for a few days. The missus and I have decided to take a long weekend, as part of the Anniversary Celebration That Ends When She Says It Ends, And If You Really Loved Me, You’d Shut Up And Take Me Antiquing Or Something Equally Horrifying.
So we’re in Maine.
We drove up this evening, muffed the directions only once, and arrived a few minutes after 9pm to find the greater Camden, Maine area closed for the night.
Not ‘closed’, precisely. Just ‘closed to the idea of serving food to people who’ve been driving for five hours and would kill a busload of innocent children for a pack of Arby’s Horsey Sauce right now’.
“Your mass child transports are safe again, moms and dads. Stand down the alert.”
Luckily, it didn’t come to busocide. We found an open grocery store, prepared ourselves a sumptuous feast of packaged cheese and crackers and almost-day-old fruit, washed it down with some local grocery store beer, and thus regained some shred of humanity. Your mass child transports are safe again, moms and dads. Stand down the alert.
Tomorrow, it’s off to do… nothing, hopefully. Or essentially nothing. I could use a nice day of maybe walking around a little, punctuated liberally with bouts of sitting, eating, drinking, napping and lollygagging, in any combination thereof. Preferably, all combinations. Maybe I should make up a Bingo card to keep track. But that sounds like work. So, no.
At any rate, I’m looking forward to a nice quiet weekend, with no office drama, responsibilities, housework, pet care, fancy clothes wearing or schedule keeping involved. Just relaxing and letting whatever it is that flows in Maine flow right over top of me. I’m hoping for India pale ale. But I’m not picky. Just so long as there’s nothing but R & R on tap for the next four days or so.
I’ll let you know how many antique wrought iron doodads we buy. You can never have enough of those.
Or so I’m told.
Permalink | No CommentsI signed up recently to take a class that my friend Jenn is teaching. I registered a few weeks ago and learned — just last night — that the class may involve writing a script for a sitcom.
The name of the class, by the way, is “Sitcom Script Writing”.
Yeah, yeah. I never said I was bright. Stop snickering.
Anyway, it got me thinking. That’s a hell of an undertaking. Even if it’s a script for an existing show, with all the characters already established and all that pilot-episode weird sexual tension just a distant Season One memory. It’s still pages and pages of words. Very few of them made up, ideally. Color me daunted, a little.
Still, I’ve got a couple of things working for me. Fourteen hundred and change incoherent rambles in this joint, for one. I came up with a few show ideas, once. They were universally unwatchable, even in summary form. A few were likely illegal. Together, they violated at least six commandments.
So, you know — good stuff.
“The only thing behind those awful ideas are more awful ideas. Terrible, sickly, palsied ideas who are pissed to have been stuck behind the first batch of stinkers for so long.”
I also mapped out an episode of 24, and planned an entire season of MythBusters. Which they never even called me about.
(Personally, I think they just don’t want to tackle the “can’tfight city hall” myth. Chickens.)
More relevantly, I also once pretended I knew something about how a sitcom should be written — actually, how NOT to write a sitcom — which I should have realized would bite me in the ass someday. Twelve rules, I came up with. I’m sure to break at least six of them — half of my own rules, damn it to hell — in the first page of anything I might manage to write.
Out. Freaking. Standing.
So, with failure assured and selling out a virtual lock, I figured the least I could do is get a few awful ideas out of the way before the first class.
I harbor no misconceptions, mind you. The only thing behind those awful ideas are more awful ideas. Terrible, sickly, palsied ideas who are pissed to have been stuck behind the first batch of stinkers for so long. Some of them probably have their pants around their ankles, for reasons I’m not at all prepared to think about right now.
So. Bad sitcom ideas. Coming right up. Don’t forget to tip the waitresses.
Unless you’re a Nielsen family. Then RUN! RUN LIKE A MILQUETOAST CHEETAH!! SAVE YOUR EYES!!
Meh. Let’s do this thing already:
Bad Sitcom Idea #1: Ever wondered what wacky misadventures befall your average young pretty dental assistant? Meet Jean, a twenty-something tooth scraper fresh out of school who just can’t seem to put it all together. She’ll drill a canal all the way to your heart as you ‘root’ for her to get her act together, find a guy, and to turn the X-rays off already, Mr. Johnson’s been in the machine for three hours! I guess his teeth won’t be having children any time soon! You’ll feel like you’re sucking nitrous through the spit-cup hose when you turn in for a dose of Hi, Jean!
Bad Sitcom Idea #2: If there was ever a hobby crying out for its own series, it’s stamp collecting. Clearly. So in this new series, Stamp By Me, follow the lives of four friends — each living in his mother’s basement — as they track down rare finds, fight over uncancelled goodies and generally philatelate their way through life, love (of stamps, mostly) and friendships that last like they’ve been licked on the back and stuck on an air mail parcel. We’ll send it LOD — Laughs on Delivery — right to your door.
Bad Sitcom Idea #3: In World War II-era France, a dysfunctional family has retreated underground to the catacombs under the city of Paris, dodging shrapnel and Gestapo raids as they wise-crack and put each other down. The father earns the family’s meager income by selling stiletto heels and fancy womens’ boots in a small shop topside, while the precocious teenage daughter flirts with any and all suitors — from Strasbourg salesmen to SS soldiers. This one’s called: Buried, With Children.
Bad Sitcom Idea #4: What would the glamorous world of rock stars be without the rock stars? Hilarious, is what. In this show, we follow the lives of the ‘other guys’ on tour — the amp luggers and sycophants, publicists, caterers and hangers-on. Who’ll accidentally break a string on the guitar player’s favorite axe, or forget to toast the baloney for the green room spread, sending the drummer’s mistress into a tizzy? That’s the fun these anonymous schmoes will have on Roadies and Toadies — where the magic happens before the magic happens.
Bad Sitcom Idea #5: In a bid to pull Jan, everyone’s favorite Brady, out of semi-retirement, this show is a vehicle for actress Eve Plumb. She’ll star as a plucky-but-tough empty nester divorcee who’s forced to start a contracting company with her handy but not-so-bright ex-husband to make ends meet. He installs pipes while she instills homespun wisdom in her now-grown kids and her company’s clients. It’s wholesome family fun on Plumb and Plumber.
Bad Sitcom Idea #6: Two words — MILQUETOAST CHEETAH! It’d be animated, most likely. Gilbert Gottfried’s not doing anything these days — he’d probably take the main voice role at a cut rate. Maybe he’s the Chee-tos cat’s wimpy brother or something. Demanding boss. Harpy wife. Cheese puff food fights with his bratty kids. Seriously, look — there’s a character sketch, half the casting and a product tie-in, already. Get a bunch of artsy twelve-year-olds in some Third World country to draw some cute whiskers and black spots on some old Garfield cartoons, and you’re finished. I’m not doing all the work for these monstrosities.
All right, that’s bad enough for now. I’m already frightened to see what’s lurking behind those heaving nightmares. And in another week or so, we may all find out. Hide your retinas and children, folks. This could get ugly.
Permalink | No CommentsConsider this fair warning to the one-and-a-half of you who may read these ramblings with some degree of regularity: it’s quite possible that I won’t be posting anything tomorrow.
Why? Because of the new rule I set for myself after last weekend, specifying that I need only do something creative each day, not necessarily writing a post of some kind.
(And more info on the short film that predicated that rule — and the class I’ll soon be taking with the esteemed director/head editor/cowriter/lead bonker for that project — soon. Very soon, now. Patience, my pet-and-a-halfs.)
Meanwhile, there’s tomorrow. And I may not have the creative juices left over for posting here, why? Because it’s self-evaluation day at the office. And I have an entire form’s worth of fancypantsed questions to answer about myself, in contexts that in no way reflect the way I think about anything having to do with me. Questions like:
“How do your goals align with the organization’s core values?”
“What kind of tree would your spirit be, if your spirit could roam free? Or as ‘free’ as an extensive underground root system will allow?”
“Did you steal the legal-sized paper from the third floor copy room and try to flush it down the toilet? Because we know it was one of you. And we’re totally going to catch you.”
(Okay, one of those questions had something to do with me. A little.
To be fair, we were out of toilet paper that day. No bathroom-going jury would convict me. Extenuating circumstances! No, you’re out of order! This whole sheaf is out of order!)
“Just tell me what you want to know; I’ll have a memoir on your desk in the morning. Signed by the author and everything. Probably written in crayon. And covered in doodled pictures of ninjas and dragons and hot rod cars.”
Anyway, tomorrow I have to turn in several paragraphs detailing why I’m doing the most incredibly useful service to humanity since some pelt-wearing goober got struck by lightning and ‘discovered’ fire crawling up his hairy legs. When I first found out about this self-review business, I was pretty stoked. For once, I thought, they’re asking the most important person who deals with me — which would be me, obviously — about ME. That’s just smart business there. I say they should have asked me about me a long time ago. Who needs the opinions of people who see me work, or pick up the pieces when I fall apart, or hear me sobbing quietly under my desk at night?
These are just observers. Me, I’m me. Just tell me what you want to know; I’ll have a memoir on your desk in the morning. Signed by the author and everything. Probably written in crayon. And covered in doodled pictures of ninjas and dragons and hot rod cars. But it’ll be about me.
So the doodles are just extra awesomeness. Superfluous, really. But I like to doodle the extra mile. That’s just the kind of guy I am.
(I should probably remember to put that on my self-evaluation. Next to an awesome doodle. Obviously.)
Of course, just as I’d convinced myself that the brass had finally come to their senses in asking my opinion, I learned that everybody is evaluating themselves this time around. And then we all have to sit with management and let them point and giggle at our answers and tell us where we’ve actually gone wrong and what we should have been working on and that our doodles are not, in fact, as outrageously awesome as we may have led ourselves to believe.
(“Did you even see the one with the ninjas? Are you suits blind, or just impervious to awesome? Hey, who’s this burly guy here? Where am I being summarily escorted to, precisely? LOOK AT THE NINJAS, DAMN YOU! THE NINJAS ANSWER EVERYTHING!”)
So I’ve got that to look forward to. But first, I have to come up with a hundred great things I “did” in the past year, which closely mirrored the organization’s core values of… um, I dunno, thrifty, cheerful and brave, or something? Liberty and justice for all? Lettuce, pickle, special sauce, onion on a sesame seed bun? No idea. I’m gonna wing it.
Also, I apparently have to describe these incredibly helpful accomplishments — did you know I personally invented the color photocopier and beat two strains of viral influenza in a three-fall tag-team wrestling match last year? — and detail how they demonstrate my elmness, or red mapleness or acting like a shoe tree or whatever the hell I’m supposed to pick in that question.
Don’t even get me started on the multiple choice questions. Or the word problem with the two trains traveling toward each other, and one stops three times and the other stops five times and if Train A is traveling from Peoria at two times the speed of Train B, which left Omaha at 8:07pm carrying eighteen passengers and a cargo of spent uranium, then why do you insist on using a non-standard PowerPoint template, because we brand these things for a reason and we’re totally docking your pay for it from now on, mister.
(Look. Your slides have a boring corporate logo. My slides have ninjas. I stand by my decision.)
So I’ll see if I have anything left after taking full credit for half our accounts, two-thirds of the office furniture, supplying most of our oxygen in a ten-mile radius and single-handedly winning the Crimean War. But I’m not counting on it. When I came up with the resume that got me into this job, I couldn’t write another word for two weeks. But it did the trick. I’m thinking somebody in HR is a ninja fan.
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