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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
There are some days — or more importantly, nights — when it just doesn’t pay to do the right thing. Or try to do the right thing. Or anything, frankly.
Take last night, for example. I had had an eventful weekend after a grueling week, and frankly needed a little extra shuteye. That’s not something I always afford myself, what with the night owl schedule and the insomniac tendencies and that spider bite I had back in third grade that was maybe really a vampire bite and hey, wouldn’t that explain a lot, except I can still sadly see myself in the mirror and garlic is delicious and I could never pull off wearing a cape and other peoples’ necks are gross, and this whole ‘vampire’ thing went to hell in a hurry. Mostly, I just didn’t want to think about some spider slobbering all over me. No such luck.
Anyway, last night. I could feel the walls of extended sleeplessness closing in around me, and so I vowed to get to bed at a reasonable hour (for once). And I did, too — I wrapped up yesterday’s post around eleven in the evening, and settled in for a nice springtime nap.
Which I got — until two o’clock in the morning. That’s when I was awakened by the clicker-clack of little pooched paws making a mutt-line for the back room. In the dead of night in this house, that can only mean one thing. As I often misquote the name of a popular movie:
THERE WILL BE POOP
“I was already suffering from PTSD — Post-Turdic Shivering Dry-heaves.”
I careened out of bed — a flurry of bedhead and boxer shorts and parts in between that no one wants to hear about, no one — and lurched after the dog down the back hallway. As I hissed at her not to do something we’d both regret — she did. A lot. It was not solid. It was not pretty. It was not what I wanted to have my nose next to for twenty minutes cleaning up. But I had no choice. So I did.
(It was either that, or train the dog to use a roll of paper towels — and a squeegee, and a power washer, and a lawn sprinkler filled with Lysol — to clean it up herself. She’d just end up eating it, probably.
And I’d seen enough horror for one night, thanks. I was already suffering from PTSD — Post-Turdic Shivering Dry-heaves. Some ungodly performance of ‘One Dog, No Cups’ wasn’t going to help my world. Or anyone else’s.)
Finally, I collected the mess and four hundred indescribably-soiled paper towels into a bag, sealed it as hermetically as I knew how, and left it for the morning. I simply didn’t have the energy to dispose of it properly, and there was enough disinfectant in the bag to kill ebola — I mean, like, all of it, ever — so I hit the sack and tried to work my way back into a sleeping groove.
That’s when I heard the birds.
Evidently — and I wasn’t aware of this until a quarter til three this morning — birds don’t necessarily wait until dawn to commence their infernal chirping. I don’t know what the hell they were doing up at that hour. They weren’t owls, for crissakes. Maybe they were catching up after taking a red-beak flight in from southern climes. Maybe they were planning some Hitchcockian attack to retaliate for the cheap stuff the neighbors put into their bird feeder. Maybe it was a full-block bobolink booty call.
I don’t know. I didn’t care. And the bastards wouldn’t. Shut. UP. For twenty minutes, I lay awake, cursing the entire avian lineage and imagining how life would be if I could wipe birds off the face of the planet. No chicken sandwiches, which is bad. Thanksgiving dinners would be a lot more ‘hammy’. But otherwise, I couldn’t see a downside. I resolved to begin my ‘If It Flies, It Dies‘ campaign in the morning — starting with whatever the hell was currently CHEEP!ing about worms or birdbaths or randy robins outside my window.
That’s when I heard the dog get up again.
This time, I headed her off at the hallway. I was wide awake at that point, so she was easier to catch. I threw on some pants and a sweatshirt — from the way it jammed my elbows into my chest, probably my wife’s — and walked the dog. At three in the morning. Without my contacts — so if the little squirt dropped a solid turd this time, I had no chance to locating it to bag it up, short of dropping to all fours and Helen Kellering the thing into a baggie.
Mostly, I made the effort so I’d have a chance to toss the gigantic bag of the last hour’s poop somewhere outside my kitchen trash can. Preferably, in a nest.
(On the outside, the birds were thunderous. Or as ‘thunderous’ as chirps belted out of a bunch of pipsqueak feather balls can be. ‘Chirperous’? Whatever.
But there were definitely dozens — at least — of the things for blocks around, peeping and cawing at each other over the trees. I couldn’t decide whether they were just laughing at me now for walking the dog in my pajamas in the middle of the night, carrying a Hefty bag full of terrier turds — or they were coordinating that Hitchcock dive bomb thing.
And at that point, I don’t know which I would have preferred, frankly.)
I felt my way back to the front door, tucked the dog under a blanket — with a staple gun, if I’d had one handy — and collapsed in the bed. I was wrecked, and fell straight to sleep. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow — nor birds, nor turds — would keep me from my appointed sleep any longer. Well past the wrong side of three AM, I finally slipped back into sweet, sweet slumber.
Until the doorbell rang. At six.
My wife had accidentally locked herself out, while what? Walking the dog.
On the third buzz — that I registered, anyway; several dozen more may have preceded it — I shalumphed out of bed, opened the door, greeted my wife in broken Wookie, and hit the sack again, ready for some uninterrupted pillow drooling.
Which was, naturally, interrupted. At seven thirty, when the alarm went off. Rise ‘n’ shine, sleepyhead — there’s a big Monday waiting for you out there, gosh!
I’ve heard that some people — great thinkers like DaVinci and Edison, notably — prefer to get their sleep in short bursts, napping a few times per day or night to optimize their productive time awake.
I’m pretty sure those people weren’t lugging sacks of shit around and contemplating weapons of mass bird genocide during their waking hours. Or they’d have slept till noon. Like I’m going to do tomorrow. The dog and the birds can go doorbell themselves right to hell. I said ‘GOOD NIGHT, SIR!!‘
Permalink | No CommentsMy wife sometimes tells me that I don’t speak clearly enough. I reply that other people don’t seem to have a problem understanding me, and maybe she’s just not listening closely enough.
To which she says, ‘Okay, dear — have a good time.‘
Case in point. A pleasant sentiment, perhaps, but case. In. Point.
On the other hand, she’s right. I’d never tell her — because she’d hear that, no problem — but she is correct. I do neglect to enunciate from time to time. Mostly, it seems, when I should speak most naturally and clearly — during an introduction.
I’d like to think that I can recite my own name properly. I mean, I did do a bit of acting when I was younger, and it’s not as though I haven’t memorized these lines. When it comes to saying: ‘Hi, I’m Charlie,’ I’ve got the material down pat. I haven’t just studied this ‘Charlie’ character; I’ve become him. I’ve lived Charlie, breathed Charlie, worked and played and eaten and drunk and slept Charlie. I am he; he is me; we are one. Charlie.
But apparently, I can’t pronounce our name. Not so English-speaking humans can understand it, anyway. Every time I meet someone new, the exchange goes like this:
“Hey, good to meet you; I’m Dave.”
“Hi, I’m Charlie.”
“Well, hi… was it ‘Jerry’?”
“No — Charlie.”
“‘Joey’?”
“Charlie. Char. Leeee.”
“Did you say ‘Chewie’?”
“Yes. That’s right, asshole. Chewie. *hhhhnnnggggghhhhhh!!* *ggggllllllrrrrrruuuuhhhhh!!* That’s me. Chewie. Because that’s a thing a normal person would be called.”
“Well, it’s swell to meet you, Chewie! This is my wife, Amidala.”
“Well, of course it is. What’s shaking, Your Excellency?”
“The point is, to people who’ve just met me, I’m apparently pretty inscrutable. Even when I’m perfectly willing to be scruted, they still can’t scrute me.”
Okay, so obviously it doesn’t go exactly like that every time.
(Sometimes the guy’s name isn’t ‘Dave’.)
The point is, to people who’ve just met me, I’m apparently pretty inscrutable. Even when I’m perfectly willing to be scruted, they still can’t scrute me. I remain scruteless in their company.
People I know, on the other hand, seem to understand me quite well. My friends seem to pick up on what I’m saying, nodding and smiling or recoiling in horror at the appropriate times. Everyone at work can hear me loud and clear — particularly, it seems, in the middle of long meetings, when I’m sitting in the back muttering about where life has gone so horribly wrong. They can hear that, let me tell you. I’ve gotten the memos and warnings.
(There was even a meeting with management to discuss repercussions. I sat in the back, and muttered about it. They heard. So we had a meeting to discuss the meeting. You can guess what happened there.
They eventually just let it go. All the muttering was distracting them from coming to a decision, they said. I told them that they were perfectly welcome to have a meeting without me, ever, since that would seem to make us all happy.
They muttered something about that. I didn’t catch it. But I bet it wasn’t good.)
You might think this snippet of realization would be a good opportunity to practice self-improvement. If I’m aware that newly-met people may not immediately understand me — whether I’m just shy around them, or have an oddly distinctive voice pattern, or it just takes time to accustom oneself to that much sexxay! in one man’s words — then perhaps I could compensate by cleeeeearly eeeee-NUN-ceee-ay-ting everything I say to them, to facilitate understanding. That seems like the prudent and mature thing to do.
OR.
Or, I could assume that around strangers its safe to loose the lid off my internal filters because no matter what I say, they’re never going to hear it the right way, anyhow. Like when I was talking to this girl I met who teaches yoga — and who found out I dabbled for a while in fauxga, and asked:
“Would you be interested in Kripalu?”
I’d known this girl for all of three minutes. So the smartass coast was clear; I didn’t even hesitate:
“I don’t know; is she hot?”
She clearly didn’t hear me correctly, because she launched into some soliloquy about the various types of yoga and which were her favorites and the traditions of each and probably other stuff that I wasn’t especially listening to. I spaced out for quite a while as she waxed yogetic on who knows how many related topics. Finally, she finished and looked at me expectantly, as though she’d ended with a question or wanted to know my innermost feelings about the whole business of whatever the business was. This time I thought for a moment, and eventually replied in what I felt was the most appropriate way:
“Okay, dear — have a good time.”
So I didn’t make a yoga friend that day, exactly, but at least now I know how my wife feels. Maybe I do mumble a little, and maybe she tunes me out if I yammer on about things she doesn’t care about. But at least she gets my name right, and never calls me ‘Chewie’.
Except when I wear the bear skin and bandolier to bed. But that’s different. And I’ve been sworn not to mumble about it.
(Or during. A simple *hhhhnnnggggghhhhrrrrrrr!!* will suffice. Or so I’m told. Quite clearly.)
Permalink | No CommentsI fear that cookbooks may be getting too specialized.
This is frankly not something I thought I’d ever need to form an opinion about. Cookbooks got along just swimmingly without my input for what, three or four hundred years? They did their thing, I stayed busy being completely disinterested in cooking or reading about cooking — or being not born yet, for a lot of those years — and everyone was satisfied.
Then cookbooks went and cocked things up — with an apron-clad assist from my wife.
Here’s the thing. The only cookbooks I ever knew were the ones my mother owned when I was growing up, back in olden times. Huge foreboding tomes, these books covered everything a budding chef of the era would ever need to know — how to hunt and gather, which cuts of brontosaurus are best, whether this newfangled ‘fire’ thing would ever catch on in the kitchen. Just for instance.
Fast-forward — a lot — to this weekend, and the new cookbook my wife brought home. It’s called, simply:
This I don’t get. First of all, I don’t see how mac and cheese requires a cookbook in the first place. This is one of the many — read: three — dishes in my personal culinary arsenal, so I feel qualified to relay the sum total of instructions needed to prepare macaroni & cheese:
“Drain pasta, squeeze fake cheese, eat directly from pot in squalid kitchenette while watching Cops reruns and wondering precisely where life went so wrong.”
1. Open cardboard box. Dump macaroni in pot of water.
2. Heat pot until water boils over top, permanently staining the stove.
3. Drain pasta, squeeze fake cheese, eat directly from pot in squalid kitchenette while watching Cops reruns and wondering precisely where life went so wrong.
That’s mac & cheese. In maybe forty words. You’re welcome.
Meanwhile, this cookbook? One hundred and thirty-two pages. On one dish, which the food science robots at Kraft practically make for you. So what the hell’s in this book? I don’t know. Do I look like the kind of person who reads books devoted to stove-top meals?
No. Don’t answer that.
So maybe the book actually has one hundred and thirty-two ways to combine melted cheese with elbow-shaped pasta. Like, I don’t know — in a blender, in a boat, with a goat, in the ballroom with the candlestick on top of Lady Peacock… I’m really not seeing it. Best-case scenario, they’ve got a chapter on the regular stuff, a page on the Deluxe version, and the rest is a pop-up book or haikus or a comic book story about a superhero who was once bitten by a radioactive wedge of aged cheddar and his right-angled doughy Italian sidekick.
Okay, now I almost want to read it. But if it’s actually about macaroni and cheese, somehow, I’d feel pretty stupid. I can’t take that risk.
I thought eleven dozen pages devoted to something I’ve been making approximately as long as I’ve been making solid poops would be the lowest cookbooks could stoop. Obviously, I was wrong. Three minutes of Amazon searching, and I found this, from a couple of years ago:
How to Boil Water — TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX FREAKING PAGES
It’s not even a dish. It’s a step. What’s next, cookbooks? The six-volume saga of ‘Turn On the Oven‘? The ‘En-saute-pedia Brittanica‘? A library wing devoted to pulling the can opener out of the drawer? Because Dewey Decimal’s going to be pissed. He’s got a System, you know. Don’t go horking it up, cookbooks.
Meanwhile, my wife made dinner tonight. Some kind of pasta dish, with ham and peas and four kinds of cheese. Don’t know what it was called, but it was pretty darned tasty. I bet she’s been reading some of my mom’s old cookbooks. Those were the days.
Permalink | No CommentsBeing observant is usually a good thing. You can follow complicated movie plots. You might find a quarter on the sidewalk. Waldo can run, but you will hunt that stripey dork down, no matter where he goes.
(Who ‘hides’ in a shirt like that, anyway? I’m pretty sure the Witness Protection Program doesn’t send their people out looking like a bunch of gangly barber poles.
Not the ones they like, anyway.)
There are times, however, when keenly-honed observational skills — even if you’re not trying to use them — can pose a bit of a complication. Imagine, for instance, that you work in an office. And further imagine that your desk in that office is in a little suite, and outside the door of that suite, maybe fifteen feet away, is the door to the ladies’ room.
Purely hypothetically. Of course.
But also imagine that you’re the observant type. You can’t help it — and you can’t turn it off, apparently. And so you learn, accidentally, more about the ladies around the office than is really comfortable. For anyone. Hypothetically.
The nightmare starts innocently enough. Maybe one morning you hear a big clunky set of shoes walking down the hallway and peek out to make sure it’s not a Clydesdale galloping toward your office. Instead, it’s the secretary from down the hall, in an enormous pair of heels apparently made from reinforced steel. As she clomps her way into the restroom, you don’t think much of it. Maybe you’ll see if she’ll eat a sugar cube out of your hand later. But otherwise, you’re just trying to mind your business as usual.
“She’s like clockwork; I think her colon may have been constructed by precision Swiss watchmakers.”
Until the afternoon, when you hear horsey pumps clickety-clacking back to the bathroom. And maybe it registers that she doesn’t come out for fifteen minutes. You’re not trying to pay attention. Attention just happens, rising unbidden to meet the sound of enormous size 11EEEs skittering through the hall.
That’s just the beginning, hypothetically. The longer you work — sorry, imagine that you work — in this office, the more you pick up about the bathroom habits of various aurally distinctive females nearby. There’s a shuffly-foot girl who routinely spends a half hour in the john after lunch. A quick-walker who’s either a chronic hand washer or is doing coke in one of the stalls — or she pees two ounces at a time, seventeen times a day. Several possibilities, none of them pleasant. And horsey pumps girl is a regular two-a-dayer. She’s like clockwork; I think her colon may have been constructed by precision Swiss watchmakers.
Only today, she didn’t show up for her after-lunch appointment. She did her morning business, but that was it. She’s never more than a couple of minutes late, but as the afternoon rolled along, her persistent absence became more and more concerning. Troubling. Worrying.
By three thirty, I could stand it no longer. I had visions of the girl collapsed at her desk, or trapped in an elevator. Or maybe called away on some dire emergency, when all she’d be able to think of is the regular tinkling that she’s missing. Panicked, I got up and walked down the hall to where she works, expecting the worst.
I found her sitting at her desk, tapping away at her keyboard. No collapse, no emergency — she seemed quite content, actually, just a big-shoed girl banging out a workaday email reply.
I stood in her doorway with my hands on my hips. When she looked up at me with a quizzical expression, I shot her an expectant look and said, ‘Welllllll?‘
‘Well what?‘
‘Hell-oooo, sister. Don’t you think it’s time you peed?‘
‘WHAT?‘
‘Come on, I’ve got work to get back to. Just get in there and sprinkle the bowl already. You’re holding me up.‘
I mentioned all of this was completely hypothetical, didn’t I? I did? Oh, good.
Suffice it to say that it’s a reasonably bad idea to track — even accidentally — the bathroom habits of several unrelated-but-equally-noisy nearby women. And it’s a phenomenally bad idea to let on that you’re paying attention. Or to try to convince them to adhere to a predictable schedule, so you can get a little work done already.
Take my word for it — they won’t appreciate the help. Even if you’ve worked up project plans and individualized schedules and to-scale PowerPoint stall diagrams. You’d think they’d at least recognize the effort. But no. Theoretically, just no.
Frankly, it’s disappointing. These people could use the assist in staying on a regular schedule — and avoiding queues, and intelligent toilet paper roll management strategies — but instead they’re too busy being ‘creeped out’ or ‘appalled’ or ‘highly uncomfortable’.
(Well of course you’re uncomfortable, clown shoes — you’ve been holding a full bladder of pee in for four extra hours. LET IT OUT, ALREADY!)
So I’d highly suggest, if you can, to keep your powers of observation under wraps as much as possible. If you don’t, you could end up in some pretty awkward, screamy and possibly constipated situations.
You know — hypothetically.
Permalink | No CommentsThere are some issues that don’t come up early in a relationship. In the early dating phase, everyone’s on their best behavior. We sit up straight, use the right forks, and keep all of our little foibles and imperfections firmly under wraps, never to see the light of day. As far as our datee is concerned, we’re as good as perfect:
“Poop? Who poops? I don’t poop. Oh, I used to poop — and it smelled like honeysuckle blossoms, obviously. But I gave it up during that time in the Peace Corps when I was helping orphaned starving babies escape rabid Nicaraguan lions. All that stopping to freshen up the jungle was really slowing down the relief work.”
We can keep this up for a while. But eventually, reality sinks in. You were never in the Peace Corps. There are no lions in Nicaragua. And the closest you’ve come to saving a baby from a rabid animal is the time you told your crying nephew to ‘take it like a man‘ when a toy poodle licked him at the pet store.
But your sweetie doesn’t know that. Not right away.
(Maybe the ‘Nicaraguan lion’ thing. Let’s be honest; you’re laying it on a bit thick there. Dial it back a notch or two, there, Indy.)
But over time, if you stay together — eat together, talk together, live together, read Encyclopedia Britannica entries on Central American fauna together — the truth will come out. You’ve got your issues. You can’t hide them any more; you’re simply not perfect. Nobody’s perfect.
Take my wife, for instance.
Oh, she fooled me for a while. Quite a while, actually — years and years. But gradually, ever so slowly, the facade crumbled. Her crafty subterfuge and misdirection could only hide the truth for so long. The dead, stinky cat is out of the bag. I know my wife’s haunting filthy secret:
She has no taste in bath towels.
“We carry a wide assortment of towels with highly-varying degrees of utility, absorbency, frayitude and ghettoness.”
(I know. It’s shocking to see it just written out bare-faced like that, isn’t it? Scandalous.)
Here’s the thing — every morning, my nearly-but-evidently-not-entirely-perfect wife gets up at the crack of five. Or six. Quarter to eight, I don’t know. Some ungodly hour when only farmers and chickens and walk-of-shamers should ever be awake.
She grabs herself a towel and washcloth from the linen closet, and — because bless her heart, she’s still pretending to be sweet to me, after all these years — she gets a set for me, as well. When she’s done with her shower, she leaves a fresh towel and washcloth on the sink for me to use when I get up. Hours and hours later, when most humans find it convenient to be awake.
I should probably say a word about our bath linens here. My wife and I have been together for a long time — through thick and thin, fluffy and threadbare, luxurious and ratty. Those aren’t our times, of course; those are our towels. And for some reason, we seem to still have most of them. We carry a wide assortment of towels with highly-varying degrees of utility, absorbency, frayitude and ghettoness. Some are old, some are new, some are borrowed, and some have apparently been used to clean up toxic spills or ‘chamois’ down the dog after a good roll in… something. Dirt? Poodle plop? Barfed-up Alpo? I’m not staring directly at it long enough to find out.
(My wife assures me it’s “probably just nail polish remover”, after a small spill emergency she once had in the bathroom.
My response: “Probably” just isn’t good enough in a situation like this. Typhoid Mary “probably” felt well enough to work. The Trojans figured there was “probably” nothing in that big honking horse statue. There are “probably” house cats in Nicaragua that look like vicious lions, if you see them out of the corner of your eye.
So yeah. Those towels? Dipped in dog shit until proven innocent. That’s my policy.)
None of this would be a particular problem — assuming you don’t consider harboring putative terrier turds in your hallway closet, which is a whole other ball of something I don’t want to know about. See, I fold the towels and put them away. And I’m very strategic about it. Good towels out front, old thinning towels on the bottom of the stack, and the ‘poodle plop’ culprit I stick way in the back, on the bottom shelf. With tongs. Hidden under a box of Q-Tips.
But when my wife picks them out, she just grabs whatever she grabs. She’s got no plan. No strategy or forethought whatsoever. She just yanks towels out of the closet willy-nilly, as though this isn’t the most critical decision in the history of our life together.
And then I get up and take a nice hot shower, reach for the towel and find some ratty pink rag, woven poorly by indentured Thai schoolchildren back in the ’60s, and possibly — “probably?” — befouled by some dank hairy beast with a diet of horse meat and Beggin’ Strips.
That’ll suck the Pert right out of your shampoo, let me tell you.
I’d think she’s just doing it to torture me — because, duh — but no. On the towel rack I’ll often find another old scrap of cloth just like mine, freshly damp and smelling faintly of shower gel and Lady Remingtons. So she’s pinging us both, only — she doesn’t care. She remains fully and completely indiscriminate in her choice of bath towels. A fact which, if I’d discovered while we were dating…
Well. We’d still be married, I think. This isn’t a ‘dealbreaker’ like bad taste in something important, like beer or sitcoms or whether the toilet paper roll goes overy-undery or undery-overy. But I’d have made some adjustments, that’s for sure.
Like burning all our old towels, and setting up our wedding registration at Bed, Bath and Two-Ply Combed Egyptian Cotton Towels Unbesmirched With Shepherd Dung.
(Seriously, it’s probably nail polish remover.
BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY TAKE THE RISK? That’s all I’m sayin’.)
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