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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I need to make a slight amendment to the rules I’ve set for myself around here.
A while back, I said to myself — and perhaps within these virtual pages — that I’d write something every day. Maybe a piece here, maybe a Zolton Does Amazon article on ZuG.com (next one due this Tuesday; stay tuned, online shopping fans), maybe over at Bugs & Cranks (who I’ve been neglecting badly of late), or somewhere else. Or nowhere, immediately — maybe I’d write something for submission, or for later, or for practice, or for the sake of annoying the dog with a bunch of loud late-night typing. The reason’s not important; it’s the writing that matters.
But that’s what I need to amend, just a bit. I didn’t write anything yesterday. Well, other than my name on a release form, maybe. But I feel I fulfilled my ‘creative duty’ to myself nonetheless, because I spent several hours of the day — and more of a Saturday morning than I’ve seen since I used to get up early to watch Scooby Doo in my footie pajamas — helping out with a short film project some old (and some new) comedic friends of mine cooked up.
Where ‘helping out with’ means ‘acted in’.
And where ‘acted in’ means ‘ad libbed in’.
And where ‘ad libbed in’ means ‘babbled nonsense toward a camera in’, ‘wore a parade of striped rugby shirts in’, and — many times more than once — ‘got bonked on the head in’.
“After six hours or so of flitting around the Boston area shooting footage to be mostly spliced out and ridiculed, I returned home to my loving and supportive wife.”
I’d say that’s as good as writing a few hundred words of nonsense and calling it a thing, so I’m amending my own rule. From here on out, I’m not necessarily writing something each day. But I’m resolving to do something creative each day. Something significant, that takes an hour or more, and that has the potential (fingers crossed) to make people laugh.
So, on the odd day here and there, it might be acting. Or ad libbing, or babbling or head-bonkee-ing. And it’s a retroactive rule, so yesterday totally counts. And if the short’s ever available online, I’ll be sure to link over to it, to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was bonked, repeatedly, on the head. With a broom. In a diner.
I know. It’s all intriguing and shit, isn’t it?
In the meantime, I don’t want to give too much away about the film, but I will relay a story from the aftermath of the shooting that should give you an idea of the flavor of the piece. After six hours or so of flitting around the Boston area shooting footage to be mostly spliced out and ridiculed, I returned home to my loving and supportive wife. Our conversation went something like this:
Her: So, how did your cartoon or whatever go?
Me: Not a cartoon, hon. A short film. Live acting. And actually, it was a lot of fun.
Her: Well, good. So what do you do in this ‘short film’, anyway?
Me: Well, I play a character. He’s sort of a hard-luck loser who nobody likes– picked on in high school, disrespected at his job, and he winds up being humiliated on the internet.
Her: So you’re playing yourself, then?
Me: Um… well, no. I mean… my character has the same name, but… hey, wait a minute, come to think of it…
Her: So did you shoot ‘on location’?
Me: We shot in locations, I guess. We drove all over Boston to do the scenes.
Her: Really? Where did you shoot?
Me: Well, there was a house in the morning, and a little diner, and we spent a couple of hours at a bar.
Her: I see. So — playing yourself?
Me: Yeah. Pretty much.
So, that was my Saturday. Many thanks to Jenn and Andrea for including me in their latest project. And for bonking me repeatedly. On the head. With a broom. In a diner.
I can’t wait to see the final cut. And not just for the vindication of knowing my stripey rugby shirts look as good on camera as they do in real life — though the pinnacle of my day was realizing that I was currently wearing the same shirt from the picture from my Facebook profile, taken during a standup set a few years back. Because the classics never grow old.
(They just shrink a little and accumulate old chest stains and get all wrinkly around the collar area.)
More than that, I’ll also get to see how my life is going to turn out, apparently. My character in the piece moved on after a bout of horrific internet humiliation. So if this stuff ever gets old, at least I’ll know what’s coming next. That’ll be nice.
Permalink | 3 CommentsSometimes I envy the dog.
And no, not because she gets to sleep eighteen hours a day and can lick her own crotch.
(If that were all it took, I’d also envy unemployed yoga instructors and narcoleptic ballerinas. And Gene Simmons. But I don’t.
Much..)
No, I envy the dog because of her potential for unwavering single-mindedness. For most of us, the world is a maelstrom of competing stimuli — a chaotic swirl of sounds and ideas and urges and desires clamoring for our attention. Case in point: in the time it’s taken me to write the preceding handful of sentences, I’ve watched half of two TV shows, checked my email four times, checked the baseball scores and gone to the kitchen to pour myself a beer.
(Also, I spent an inordinate amount of energy thinking about narcoleptic ballerinas. Is that hot? Or just unfortunate? Entertaining in an ‘oh, my Rapture invitation must have gotten lost in the mail’ sort of way?
Is it all fun and games until somebody faceplants onto the stage mid-pirouette? Is it worth making the Black-Eyed Swan joke? Can we just go back to my dog now? Yes. Let’s.)
My dog, on the other hand, is not distracted by such things. At least, not always. Sometimes, yes. She has a brain the size of a sucked-on Raisinette, so there are times when she is eminently distractable by essentially anything. A piece of lint. Her own reflection. Calypso music. A gentle breeze. Impressionist art. A poodle turd. Distant sirens. Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel’s philosophical oeuvre. Not necessarily in that order.
“It’s not ‘cattedness’ or ‘hedgehoggedness’ or ‘African pygmy rhinocerosedness’. And it’s certainly not ‘narcoleptic ballerinadness’.”
But there are also times when she locks on, when her fuzzy little mind and body and spirit join as one to pay Attention-with-a-capital-A to something of supreme interest. She does not waver. She will not falter. And she sure as hell won’t listen to me, if I happen to ask her to come in from of the rain or get out of the street or get her fat furry ass off my damned foot, you heavy little cow. Because she’s locked on.
(There’s a reason they call the full-on relentless pursuit of a goal ‘doggedness’. It’s not ‘cattedness’ or ‘hedgehoggedness’ or ‘African pygmy rhinocerosedness’. And it’s certainly not ‘narcoleptic ballerinadness’. It’s ‘doggedness’‘. And my dog is dogged. I’ll give her that.)
Take tonight, for instance. After work, I swung by the doggie daycare joint — why yes, my testicles do shrink just a little every time I type ‘doggie daycare’; hey, thanks for asking — to retrieve the mutt for the evening. Usually, she has a routine. She’ll sleep — big shocker there — until I arrive, leash in hand and ready to go. Then she’ll slooooowly rouse herself, streeeeeeetch out her aging bones, and then… does she saunter up to me, wagging her grateful tail? Does she bound up the stairs, eager to return to the home and soft blankets and food and toys that my wife and I have provided for her? Does she bark or pant in excitement that her master has come back to see her once again?
Right. Those pygmy rhinocerii will fly backwards out of my butt before any of those things happen.
No. Usually, she gets up and stretches herself so she can take a lazy relaxed tour around the perimeter of the floor, snurfling up any wayward treats or bits of kibble that may have been left behind. By the dogs who do real training work in the place. She’ll also wag and preen hopefully in the direction of anyone currently in a training class — or waiting for class, or teaching a class, or delivering supplies, dropping off mail or simply passing by — in the hope of more treats, hand-delivered to her insatiable gullet.
Oh, she could greet her receiving line and Hoover up the joint any time during the evening. But no. It has to wait until I’m standing there to watch, leash in hand and double-parked outside, desperate to get home to my own napping cushion and water dish. That’s the dance we tango.
Only today, it wasn’t the dance. Today, there was nobody in the room when I happened along to get her. Just the dog, lying in the middle of the floor, gnawing furiously at… something. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. A rawhide treat? Someone’s wallet? A dead chinchilla? I didn’t know what to hope for least.
Turns out it was — as best I can tell — a beef knuckle. And while that sounds like some colorful euphemism for some kind of disgusting body part or other that I don’t want to think very hard about, it’s actually a beefy joint from some limb of a cow that’s often given to dogs as a treat.
(So it’s still a disgusting body part — just not exactly in the way — or from the body — that I earlier suggested. Happier?
Me, neither. Moving on.)
Now, I don’t know whether someone gave my dog this treat, or whether she snarfed it from some unknown toy bin, treat bag, desk drawer or hidey-boney-hole. But I figured it she had it now, and no one was complaining, I’d let her keep it — but we should get the hell out of there, just in case. Post-haste, and preferably unseen.
This is where the pooch’s single-track steel-trap brain came in handy. She wanted that bone.
(Or more accurately, that mangled slobbery mess of cow cartilage, sinew, gristle and joint. But I’m going to call it a ‘bone’ from here on out, mostly to try to avoid horking all over my keyboard. You can always substitute the full description in your head, if you like. Weirdo.)
Anyway, she wanted that ‘bone’. And in that moment, she wanted and saw and recognized little else. I could — with considerable prejudice — coax her to leave with me as usual. But she clamped onto that bone like it was her only lifeline out of quicksand, and focused solely on the minimum she had to do to get back to chewing. So there was no snurfling. No tour of the grounds. When we got outside, there was none of her usual exploratory sniffing or yanking the leash or desperately needing to SEE WHAT’S OVER THERE! None of that. Instead, she stayed close, squatted an obligatory workmanlike stream of pee onto the sidewalk — bone clenched firmly in jaw the whole time — and dutifully followed me to the car.
Once in the back seat, she was lost to the world. In the few blocks home, she didn’t pace or sniff or hang tongue out the window, as per usual. She lay on the seat and sucked joint juice from that bone like milk through a straw. An extremely sloppy, disgusting, smelly straw. But she didn’t care. She was LOCKED IN.
We’ve been home for three hours now. She carried the bone from the car to the building — she practically ran across the street — set up shop on a blanket in the office, and hasn’t moved from the neck down since. From the jaws forward, she’s a blur — a flurry of teeth and snout and fur. It’s disturbing. There are piranhas passing by going, ‘Jesus, girl — take a breath already. It’s just meat.‘
But still, she’s into it. Eventually, it’ll occur to her that she’s thirsty, or hungry, or that there are turds piling up somewhere inside her like backward-‘Z’ pieces on a Tetris board. But for now, and for the entire length of the evening, she remains ‘LOCKED. IN.‘
And yes, I’m actually kind of jealous. Not for the retch-inducing heifer hoof, or whatever that ungodly thing is. But I wish I could have that dog’s resolve, the single-minded purpose and steel-plated will to pursue one singular thing, even for just a few hours, in lieu of all else.
Preferably in service of something less mind-numbingly disgusting — it’s the smell, I’m telling you; I feel like I’m spooning a side of rancid beef marinated in a boxer’s bloody spit bucket — but still, the dedication is impressive. You just don’t see that kind of focus very often these days. Not in me, for certain. Or in most people. Probably not even in narcoleptic ballerinas — and they have to try harder than anyone, what with all the falling and napping and slumping in their tutus.
So. That’s my mutt, and her beef joint, and our disgusting-smelling Friday night. Living the dream, all right. Living the dream. Here’s hoping the start of your weekend has been as highly-focused as hers, but more fragrant than mine. Happy Friday, kids.
Permalink | No CommentsThe missus and I have an anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks, and it’s kind of a doozy. Not a ‘years-ending-in-zero’ doozy — we’ve had one of those already — but a reasonably big one. Let’s just say that if I were to forget and spend the day sitting on the couch in my underpants watching Archer reruns and saying, ‘Gosh, why so fumy, hon? This is funny stuff!‘, there’d be consequences.
Consequences and repercussions.
Happily, I’m unlikely to forget our anniversary. For one thing, I’m sweet like that. For another, I just told the three of you, so you can nudge me if I should tip over into apparent self-absorbed marital forgetfulness. Also, I taped reminders inside the back of all of my boxer shorts.
(In retrospect, I should maybe have taped those to the outside or the front of those boxers. Then I’d see them right away if I wind up watching cartoons on the Big Day.
I’d write myself a note to switch the reminders around. But now I don’t know where the hell to put it. Marriage is hard.)
Unhappily, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to get her. We keep these occasions relatively low-key, but I think I need to make at least a little splash this time. A pack of Juicy Fruit and a ‘nice to wed ya!‘ probably isn’t going to cut it. And she knows where my testicles sleep. It’s time to tread carefully.
“My presents usually look like footballs packed in mashed potatoes, papered over by a one-legged ostrich. With Parkinson’s. Wearing a mitten.”
The suggested lists of anniversary presents are crap for this year — absolute crap. The ‘traditional’ gift is crystal — and I don’t even know what that means. In my world, ‘crystal’ is an adjective — crystal ball, crystal clear, Crystal Light, The Crystal Method. I don’t know how to wrap an adjective and tie a big fancy bow around it.
(To be fair, I don’t really know how to wrap actual noun-part-of-speech gifts, either. My presents usually look like footballs packed in mashed potatoes, papered over by a one-legged ostrich. With Parkinson’s. Wearing a mitten.
But I can pay somebody to wrap the hell out of that stuff. Or at least to maybe cut the ostrich some toe-holes.)
Clearly, ‘crystal’ isn’t going to help me.
The ‘modern’ list is even more useless — watches. Not because it’s not specific enough or the wrong part of speech or a bad idea in general. It’s just a bad idea for me.
I’ve bought my wife a watch before, you see. A nice watch — not outrageously overdone or expensive, but certainly elegant and classy. A shining example of fine Bolex craftsmanship. It was a few years back. She seemed very excited to get it, and I think she really liked it.
She lost it.
It got snagged getting off the subway or running to catch a cab or something; she didn’t notice, and it was gone. She seemed pretty upset about it, but I smoothed her hair and told her not to worry. It was the simplest little thing in the world to fix. I’d just go back down to that big fancy jewelry store downtown — and then around the corner behind the dumpster, where the guy sells watches out of the back of his van — and I’d get her another one. And soon enough, I did.
She lost it.
We didn’t go through a lot of rounds of this — the guy’s van was only so big, after all — but it gradually became clear that my wife is simply not meant to wear certain things on her wrist. Anything wispy or delicate or with a little flimsy clasp — it’ll be gone within a week, snagged or unhooked or yanked off while her attentions are elsewhere occupied. Fancy watches, tennis bracelets, medic alert tags — they’re all off-limits at this point. She wears a sturdy — but feminine — and fairly plain watch these days, which she presumably picked out on the basis of its hermetically-sealing molecular-bonded SecurAll combination clasp. But she requested a long time ago that I refrain from trying to adorn her wrists, lest she feel bad for losing gifts or we dive deep into debt to the ‘Pulova’ corporation.
(To be fair, she’s had about the same amount of non-luck in buying watches for me. Not because I lose them — I just won’t wear them.
The last watch I wore regularly was a self-winding number with a plain brown leather strap. I put it on most every day for two or three years — until the strap gave out. Now, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout restrappin’ no watches. And what am I going to do, take my half-assed used Tinex TineKeeper downtown to the fancy watch shop VW Mini and say, ‘Can you please wrap some cowhide around my ghetto broken-down watch face, mister?‘
They’d laugh me right off the curb. I’ve seen kids with an armful of SillyBandz look down their nose at that watch. The Swatch crowd would get together and hoot at it, probably — if they weren’t all busy aging badly and pretending they never spent a full summer memorizing all the lyrics to ‘Safety Dance’.
My wife took the opportunity to buy me a replacement — a man’s watch, the kind my father used to wear with the expand-o metal band and a big thick solid face and Swiss movements and German styling and probably the French or the Portuguese or the Belgians had something to do with it, too. All of Europe made this watch. It may well have been one of the continent’s greatest achievements — fine wines, Heidi Klum and this watch.
I wore it once.
It was just heavy and bulky and by that point, I was really enjoying not having something strapped hard onto my wrist all day. So I gave it a shot, thanked her sweetly, and put the watch away in a desk drawer. It’s still in there — I see it occasionally, when I’m looking for an old receipt or the stapler or I can’t find the checkbook. It’s a beautiful watch. It’s just not going to happen.)
So I’m basically screwed. I can’t use the suggestions, I can’t give her nothing, and I’m just not smart enough to come up with the right gift on my own. It seems I’ve got no choice. I’ll buy her that pack of gum, wrap it up like a crack-addled four-year-old, and send my testicles off to a safe house for a few weeks until things blow over.
Did I mention marriage is hard? Marriage is HARD.
Permalink | 3 CommentsI’m starting to think that House Hunters on HGTV is the most important show on television right now.
Hold on, now — don’t run off cackling. I can back this up. Seriously. Give me a shot here.
If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it’s essentially a half-hour semi-documentary of home buyers, their real estate agent, and the process they go through in buying a new house or condo or vacation villa or chinchilla ranch or whatever it is they’re prepared to throw ungodly gobs of money at.
(And if you’re familiar with the show… well, it’s still exactly the same thing I just said. The format’s not going to change just because you happen to be aware of it, now, is it? Silly goose.)
Now let me be clear — I’m not claiming that this is the most entertaining show on TV. Far from it. Watching an overwrought Midwestern couple “ooh” and “aah” over the wainscoting in some outdated split-level ranch can give C-SPAN a run for its money on the old Snooze-O-Meter. You don’t watch this show for the “wow” factor.
(If you’re like me, you might initially watch it for the “holy bejeezus, I’m so glad that’s not me any more” factor because you just bought a condo in the last couple of years, and you’re never. Moving. Again.
I’m not kidding. I remember scouring the Sunday paper for real estate ads, and planning drive-by looky-loos through every stupid neighborhood in a twenty-mile radius around Boston. Including some in the middle of the bay.
Well. Some that should have been dumped out there, anyway. When your ‘curb appeal’ would improve if the whole block were surrounded by fish pee and sand bars, you might need to rethink the whole ‘selling’ business. Perhaps ‘burn down and collect the insurance’ would be a better angle. I’m just spitballing here.)
“Everything I’ve ever needed to know about human nature and the ways of the world, I learned from two half-hour fluff real estate shows.”
So why watch this House Hunters show? Because it’s important. Everything I’ve ever needed to know about human nature and the ways of the world, I learned from two half-hour fluff real estate shows. If I owned children, this is the first — and perhaps the only — television program I’d want them to watch. There are invaluable life lessons to be gleaned from this show. For instance:
Other People Suck
On each episode, the format is the same: the agent will tour his or her charges through exactly three potential homes, breezily pointing out the features and salient details of each.
And the prospective buyers will follow along, ripping each place a new backdoorhole as they go. No niggling little detrimental detail goes unremarked. This kitchen’s too small. The yard is too big. This sink’s the wrong shape. The carpet’s on fire. The bedroom smells like moose sweat. There are gypsies squatting in the basement. On and on and on they go.
What’s the take-home message from all of this?
Everybody sucks. The buyers suck because they’re always bitching. The agent sucks because he or she is clearly not doing the job. The current owners suck because, you know, like it or not, the bitchy lady is sort of right about the wallpaper color and the way the living room is set up. Who lives like that? Philistines, that’s who.
By the midpoint of the show, there’s absolutely no one to cheer for. Nobody represented in any way on the screen has a single redeeming or sympathetic quality whatsoever. Which may seem sort of harsh, and perhaps not a lesson you’d want passed along to the younger generation.
Sure, you say that now. But just wait until your kids have to deal with the staff at the DMV, or return something at a megamall department store, or vote for Congress. Yeah. You want them discovering the blank-eyed soulless stares of disaffected humanity then, or on the comfort and relative safety of your living room couch?
That’s what I thought.
Life Is Essentially Random
As the show careens into the final commercial break, there’s always a cliffhanger hanging through the ad spots — which one will they choose? Three possible buys, with good points grudgingly acknowledged and detriments nitpicked over like a trio of itchy raw scabs. This is where the audience can play along, and guess — based on the buyers’ comments — on which place they’ll end up making an offer.
There are often subtle clues and nuances to guide these predictions — what factors the buyers value the most, their initial reactions in each home, the tenor and content of their later on-camera discussions. With this information in hand, it’s possible to make a solid and well-informed hypothesis about which choice best matches their preferences.
It’s also possible to be WRONG roughly ninety percent of the time. Because what people say they want and what they then do is completely unrelated. ‘Low-maintenance’ empty nesters buy a palace. The guy who runs a dog kennel buys the place with no pets. The couple deathly allergic to peanuts moves into the Planters nut factory. Why? “For the view.” But you’re also blind! “Well, I guess it just felt right.”
And there’s the lesson. When it comes to other people — or anything else, really — don’t bother trying to predict the future. Between chaos theory, butterfly effects, random chance, Brownian motion and the ephemeral whims of your average ADD-addled human, it’s pointless. You may know in your heart that the elderly librarian couple belongs in that quiet little brownstone condo — your freaking last name is Brownstone, you old cows, damn you for failing to take a sign from the universe! — but they’ll pick the South Beach party boat, anyway. You’ll never talk sense into them. Just slap on a thong and enjoy the ride.
There Are No Right Answers
The interesting thing about the three properties on each show is that none of them are really ideal for the buyers in question. Or particularly suitable. Or possibly even habitable.
It’s a Goldilocksian barrage of near-misses, almost-wases and maybe-coulda-beens. And the porridge is never ‘just right’. It’s always too expensive or too small or too far from the beach or too infested with vermin to really match. Or it’s not even built yet. That’s a popular one — just imagine what this will look like when the walls are up!
That’s no freaking help. I could imagine all sorts of things, if all I know is ‘walls are involved’. They could build a doctor’s office or federal penitentiary or a Great Something of China, and walls would be involved. In my imagination, all the walls are listing at a thirty-degree angle and oozing pus onto the floor. Is that what you had in mind, Mr. Century 21 man? NEXT HOUSE, PLEASE!
Of course, what you learn from this is that you’ll never get what you want. Ever. In anything. Oh, you might convince yourself after the fact that you got exactly what you were after. But if you had a camera crew following you around non-stop, they’d have you on film from the week before, saying snarky things about the overgrown bushes and the humid basement and the old outdated appliances.
If you’re lucky, you’ll just be talking about your new house. And not your girlfriend.
Everybody Lies
The tricky thing about the lying is recognizing all of the levels on which its happening. The surface fibbing is obvious. The buyers are lying to us — or themselves — about what they want. The agents are lying about being good agents, or listening to whatever ridiculous criteria their clients are spewing. Those are easy ones.
Then there’s the minute-to-minute lying going on. If you watch more then twelve seconds of the show, it’s patently obvious that most of it is staged. Not ‘falsified’, exactly, maybe — but if you believe for a moment that the cameraman just happened to catch the family strolling along the road casually chatting about the pros and cons of each place in a highly-structured and clearly-enunciated fashion, then I have three slightly irregular plots of Florida swampland I’d like to show you tomorrow. None of them are what you’re really after, but you have to buy one, so tough luck, mortgage boy. That really escrows the pooch, no?
More than that, the whole show is grossly misrepresenting the home buying process. These people see three properties in the space of a week or so, talk it through in one recap conversation, then make an offer?
Horse puckey.
When we bought this place, we’d seen a dozen or more properties before we pulled the trigger. The back-and-forth in negotiations went on all night, got heated, and the real estate agents had to finally get involved before a lawsuit came out of it.
And that was just me and my wife talking it over. Don’t get me started on the process with the seller, or the Leaning Tower of Paperwork we went through to get the deal sealed. And this was the easy one. I’ve blocked out most of the rigmarole from our first experience. I remember we looked at more than thirty places before we had an offer accepted, though. Those measly three in the show? That’s not even an appetizer in the real estate game. Pants. On. Fire.
No One Else’s Grass Is Greener
You might think HGTV would be satisfied with delivering these truths to our homes in the original packaging. But no. A while back, they launched a second vehicle, House Hunters: International, to follow potential buyers all over the globe.
The scenarios changed. The locations are exotic. The people often come from faraway lands, and buy in even farawayer locales. It’s a whole different ball game. But you know what stays the same?
People suck. Life’s unpredictable. Nobody ever gets what they want, and everybody lies. All over the damned planet, apparently.
I’m telling you, these programs are a goldmine. I’m just waiting for House Hunters: Intergalactic to tie it all together some day. Set your TiVos to ‘learn’.
Permalink | 1 CommentOur neighborhood has been inundated in recent days. Not with rain — although, yes, also with rain. It’s unfortunate that the stupid weather couldn’t cooperate long enough for me to borrow ‘inundate’ for ten minutes to make one damned point about something else. But no. That’s how weather is. It’ll shiv you with a lightning bolt as soon as your back is turned.
Anyway, the other inundation going on around here lately is a flood of charity collectors roaming the streets, cheerfully greeting passersby and shaking them down for cash. I don’t mean panhandlers — these are apparently honest-to-goodness charitable volunteers for actual organizations, with all the accoutrements those positions entail. Matching ‘official’ work vests. Standard-issue clipboards. Grimly serious ‘important work is being done’ expressions. And the enthusiasm of a thousand sugar-buzzed junior high cheerleaders.
Frankly, it’s frightening.
In the past, when I’ve spotted a pair of these solicitors — they always work in twos, it seems — my first instinct was to cross the street to avoid them. Unless there’s one working each side of the street, in which case… well, I don’t know. Turn around and go home? Catch a cab for a block to get past? Hide in a mailbox until they’re gone? None of the options are good.
The other — sometimes only — choice is to walk briskly past, politely declining to hear about whatever they’re pushing as the Most Important Decision You Can Make Today du jour.
See, and that’s why I generally try to avoid contact in the first place. I’ve got nothing against charity. I like charity. I give to charity. I’ll probably receive charity someday, when I’m too old and decrepit to take care of myself. Could be next week, maybe. I’m walking a pretty fine line as it is.
“CAN I COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT TODAY TO ‘BEE’ A GOOD SAMARITAN?!”
But I give to the charities that I choose to give to. I think about it, decide what’s important from my point of view, and then I mail in my check or cash or have a cup of coffee sent every day to starving rebels in Bolivia, or whatever the hell it is they ask for. The point is, it’s a considered decision. I may not catch all the details, or know how the money’s being used, or have any memory of the transaction a few days later and wonder how the World Wildebeest Fund managed to siphon cash out of my account. But for a brief lucid moment, I chose. On my own volition, fractured though it is.
That’s not how these charity urchins work. These people are the pop-up ads of charitable donations. You’re strolling along, minding your own business, and wham:
‘HELLO, SIR! DID YOU KNOW THAT NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT OF CHILDREN IN AMERICA UNDER THE AGE OF FOUR CAN’T READ AT EVEN A SIXTH-GRADE LEVEL?! WON’T YOU SAVE OUR YOUTH?! ONLY YOU, SIR, CAN EMBIGGEN OUR CHILDREN!!‘
Or:
‘HI, HOW ARE YOU?! HEY, THAT’S REAL SWELL! CAN WE TALK ABOUT IMMUNIZING AFRICAN HONEYBEES?! HONEY PRODUCTION IS AT AN ALL-TIME LOW DUE TO DEVASTATING BEE MEASLE EPIDEMICS! CAN I COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT TODAY TO “BEE” A GOOD SAMARITAN?!‘
Or possibly:
‘ARE YOU AWARE OF THE CURRENT PLIGHT OF THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINALS?! GLOBAL WARMING HAS MADE THE OUTBACK WINDS SO STRONG, THEIR TRADITIONAL HATWEAR SIMPLY BLOWS AWAY! BLOWS! AWAY!! WE NEED MONEY TO PROPERLY HEADCLOTHE THESE GENTLE NOBLE SOULS! HOW DO YOU SLEEP WITH YOURSELF AT NIGHT, SIR?! HEY! COME BACK HERE, YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!!‘
Now, these are all fine causes, I’m sure. Fine, ridiculous and utterly nonsensical causes. But they’re not my causes. And if I’m shambling to work or skipping home or just walking aimlessly around the neighborhood, I’m not looking for a new cause. That’s what late-night TV commercials with teary-eyed celebrities are for. Not sidewalks.
But many of these people won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Or ‘NOOOOO!!‘ for an answer. Some of them will take ‘LA! LA! LA! LA! LA! LA! LA!‘ for an answer, but not that many. And none of them will take it as a credit card number. I’ve tried that. Not so popular.
We’ve been so thick with these people lately that I’ve given up on avoiding them. And I feel like an inhumane asshole if I just walk away from them — mostly when they scream ‘YOU INHUMANE ASSHOLE!!‘ at me while I’m doing it.
So I’ve taken to the passive approach. When I see one of the vest-and-clipboard-and-concerned-eyebrows types, I don’t veer off. If they approach me, I engage and listen to their spiel. I just stand quietly — smiling and nodding as though my boss or wife or mother is telling me something they think should be important — and wait for them to finish. Then I wrinkle my forehead a little, as though I’m thinking about it, and toss them a short non sequitur. Something along the lines of:
‘My dog hates the water. Unless you put it in her mouth.‘
‘Your hair smells like spring cleaning.‘
‘If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he’d be really old.‘
And then I walk away. I call it the “Ralph Wiggum defense”. Nobody’s ever followed me or called me names or said, ‘BUT DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE ALBINO MOUNTAIN YAKS?!?‘ They just move on, and so do I. It’s the most humane way for both of us to get back to our business, and frankly sort of entertaining.
I’m just waiting for one of them to ask for my contact information, so they can start a charity to help me. That would be sweet. So long as they hound for collections in somebody else’s neighborhood. We’re full up over here. And I’m running out of Wiggumisms. WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE WIGGUMSES?!?
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