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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I have a pretty unique commute to work — at least for a big city like Boston. While most people around here are crawling to work in tin cans of some kind — cars, trains, subways, the occasional bathysphere — I’ve got a quick twenty-minute walk from my door to the office.
But like proctology exams and drunken sexual encounters — just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it’s easy.
My jaunt to work includes many obstacles and dangers. There’s the overwhelming urge to race back home and hide under the covers, naturally. And the Massholes weaving recklessly in their SUVs and Beemers and personal deep sea exploration vehicles. But many days, the biggest hurdle I face on the way to work is a teeny tiny little lady, maybe five feet tall. I’ve never spoken to her — but she chats nearly non-stop, aggressively, to me and everyone else around. While she wields a battery of small sharp objects. Also, small animal parts.
I should probably explain.
“Like a shrill angry little siren, she devotes her life to luring unsuspecting travelers into her clutches, in this case to order from her steaming pans of fried rices and Szechuan delights.”
On the way to my building is another building on the same block. And on the ground floor of that building is a small food court, with a handful of lunchy-style restaurants. And in one of those food stalls — an Asian concern; something about ‘Pandas’ or ‘Dragons’ or ‘Crushing the Spirit of Tibet’, I’ve never really looked at the sign — stands the lady previously mentioned. Like a shrill angry little siren, she devotes her life to luring unsuspecting travelers into her clutches, in this case to order from her steaming pans of fried rices and Szechuan delights. Hence the animal parts and pointy sticks — chicken bits on toothpicks — that she wields like edible General Tsao-issued shurikkens at anyone walking by.
And I mean anyone, anywhere in the vicinity of the foodcourt. The woman’s English may be limited, but her enthusiasm is decidedly not. On a slow morning, she’ll scream across the room to people walking in the door:
‘Hey! You dere! Try chicken! You want try chicken? Here, chicken! Is good!!‘
Occasionally a flock of businessmen will gaggle by, on their way to some frou-frou upscale joint. Undeterred, she’ll wave poultry in their faces and make her pitch:
‘Good lunch time! Try chicken; good prices! No wait for fancy napkins and sparkle water. You try now!‘
In the lunch rush, she’s like a horny dervish of salesmanship, propositioning anything that moves. Sometimes, she gets caught in a loop, like a needle on a scratchy record:
‘Come try chicken! You — have chicken! Take it now! Free sampa! Sampa! Sampa! Sampa! Sampa! Sampa!‘
I don’t know what kind of business she does. I don’t see how many people take her samples, and how many actually order from her place. And I have no idea whether the food’s any good or not.
(Though in my experience, anything sold that hard tends to be a touch substandard in the quality department.
The attractive hookers aren’t the ones with the BOGO ad flyers and parking validation, is all I’m saying.)
What I do know is this: I have to walk past her place every day, in the middle of the morning when there’s no one else around. That’s when she’s most desperate, and if the place is completely deserted I’m treated to a steady stream of Szechuan sales pitch from one end of the hallway to the other. It’s like my own personal moo goo gai gauntlet. Or the ‘running of the bullshit’, with Peking duck substituted for Pamplona beef.
I wonder whether she recognizes me — do all customers look the same to her? — but her tone gets progressively darker the further I walk without taking the bait. Her place is in the center of the court, and she starts the hard sell sweet. Or some reasonable MSG-laden facsimile thereof:
‘Hey, come try sample! Good chicken — you smart guy! Good bargain! Buy now, save for lunch! Smart eater here!‘
I try, as best I can, to signal a polite but firm NO by shaking my head and smiling apologetically, while also making sure to avoid eye contact. For one thing, I don’t want to encourage her, and I’m pretty sure a met glance would dial the chatter up exponentially. Also, it’s pretty clear that one day she’s going to start just winging toothpicked chicken chunks at people indiscriminately, and I’d prefer not to catch one right in the peeper.
So I shake my head regretfully and walk on. This does nothing but piss her off, right around the time I’m passing her stall:
‘Wha, you won’t take sampa? You too good for chicken sampa? Or you scared of chicken? Where you going, tough guy?‘
I just keep walking — or some days, running — toward the far wall and the safety of the exit. By the time I reach it, she’s usually switched over to her native tongue, and is probably loudly questioning the fidelity of my heritage in Mandarin or Cantonese or Kung Pao or wherever she’s originally from. But finally, I make my escape and can put the ordeal behind me.
Until the evening, when I come strolling back through the joint on my way home. And she’s still there, hoarse from screaming but loud as ever, peddling the leftovers that she didn’t manage to move during the dinner rush. Or the lunch rush. Or since last weekend, for all I know. There could be little mummified morsels on the ends of those toothpicks. Or they could be sublime. I’m not getting close enough to find out.
I’m just waiting for the day when I come through the deserted food court and she’s finally had enough, and leaps over the counter at me as I walk by. As the business ends of a thousand wooden ninja toothpicks enter my soul, I’ll bleed out there on the rubberized floor with one last whispered curse coursing through my ears:
‘You take sampa now, eh, mista? Is good, too! You buy beef with broccoli before you die. Lucky bargain for you!‘
I just have one request. Make sure they bury me in sweet and sour sauce. I think we’d both want it that way.
Permalink | 1 CommentI’ve decided that when the apocalypse comes, I’m going to be in some serious trouble.
I suppose we all will be, what the lava gushing or the Martians invading or ravenous packs of Rachael Ray clones roaming the countrysides. I don’t know what’ll cause the Big One™, exactly. But something will. Something always does.
And then, there we’ll be — stuck in some stark horrifying Mad Maxxian nightmare, probably with a bunch of Mayan ancestor ghosts mooning us and giving us the finger — and we’ll have to deal with it. We’ll just have to buckle down, work together as best we can (or loot the local spiked leather store and form rival dingy hot rod gangs), and find a way to survive. I’ve thought about that a lot lately, in light of recent disasters, natural and otherwise. Facing down the odds, scraping by on wits alone, and surviving.
And I’ve come to a troubling conclusion: I’ve got nothing.
It’s true. In a disaster-wracked hellscape, I’m about as useful as a pedicure coupon.
(Not that you couldn’t use a spot of foot care in that situation. But I’m assuming here that the nail salon is under thirty feet of rubble, or has been carried off by genetically riled-up mutant pterodactyls. And the one down the street doesn’t honor other places’ discounts. So the coupon — not so good.)
Let’s take a look at what I’ve got going for me, here in this idyllic post-modern 21st century age. I can program a computer, on a good day. I tell jokes. I’m pretty tall.
And that’s kind of it, frankly.
(You’d think I’d have had time in forty years on the planet to develop some other sort of skill or useful characteristic. And I totally meant to.
But do you know how many Simpsons reruns are on, every single day? That takes up an awful lot of time right there. Also, I walked to school as a kid. That’s, like, twenty minutes each day — five days a week, nine months a year. I mean, I’m just one man over here. I’m lucky I had time to put on pants, for crissakes.)
“So are those talents going to help me when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, War, uh… Dopey, I think, and… Jermaine? — start gallumphing around and turning people to salt or whatever?”
So are those talents going to help me when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Famine, War, uh… Dopey, I think, and… Jermaine? — start gallumphing around and turning people to salt or whatever? Dream on, Tonto.
Here’s how I see it. The coding thing is right out the window, for a start. If the computers haven’t all been deep-fried, buried or dry-humped into submission by our new Terminator overlords, then whatever’s left will be cut off, crippled and effectively useless. The infrastructure’s in shambles, remember — the network is shot, satellites hurtling to earth, cell towers eaten by swamp monsters.
(So basically, your average day on a Verizon phone contract. Zing!)
What’s left to program then? I could maybe make a web page on the local hard drive to display your last will and testament, or work up a pivot table in Excel to chart just how progressively screwed you’re getting as the zombies close in. Helpful? No. Useful? No. HTML5 and CSS standards compliant? Maybe.
(But when the standards committee has fallen into a crevasse and is currently roasting slowing over the Earth’s molten core, who’s going to quibble if I leave a ‘div’ tag or two open? Nobody, that’s who.)
So programming is out. The jokes — you might think the jokes would be a plus, what with all the misery swirling around the survivor camp. But most of my material involves social norms and observation and poking fun at society. I can imagine how that shit will fly at the ‘Comedy Campfire’ when there’s half a percent of humanity left kicking around:
Me: Hey, thanks for coming out. Any Red Sox fans in the crowd?
Patron: Nope. All dead.
Me: Oh. Right. How about Yankees fans?
Patron: Eaten by werewolves. You were there.
Me: Oh, yeah… that was them. Well… how about a blonde joke?
Patron: Nobody has hair. Flaming meteors burned it off. Baldy.
Me: Ah. Hrm. Uh… hey, who’s got a small penis in the crowd?
Patron: All of us. Eight on each hand. Mutant space virus. Booooo!
Yeah, I’m not going there. I’ve been thrown off enough stages. The last thing I need is to get tossed around by a couple of bald bouncers with hands covered in wangs. Which is why I’m never going back to Vegas again, too.
All I’ve got left is height. And what the hell good is that in a wasteland? All the tall shit has been stomped, toppled, crushed or razed. Today, I can help, say, an old lady reach her vitamins on the top shelf at the drug store.
(I mean, I don’t, of course. She might have some sort of old person disease, and who knows when they last cleaned that shelf up there? Get a ladder or learn to high jump, shorty. Me and Darwin are busy over here stretching our freakishly long calf muscles.)
But in the After Times? I can reach up and grab nothing from the nothing in the middle of a pile of rubble that might have been the Walgreen’s, but those invisible Centrum Silvers aren’t going to help granny very much. And she’ll still be around, because she can cook. Everybody needs food, so the survivors will be sweet on her.
And if I can’t make myself useful fetching things that short old gals like her might need, then I’m just extra drumstick meat on the plate when the going gets tough. Those little biddies can’t run very fast, but they’re wily. They’ll catch me eventually. And then I’m in a jam. Literally.
So it’s not looking good for me, if the sky soon fills with fire and brimstone — or saucers and laser beams, or vampire bats and ghouls, or penis-fingered mutants and exponential Rachel Rays flying in airplanes. I don’t hunt. I don’t gather. I can’t keep one of those desert buggies with the tire spikes and the cowcatcher running in the heat. I have absolutely zero marketable skills for an after-disaster situation. It looks like I’m doomed. Damn.
I just hope the old ladies stew me properly before serving me around the comedy campfire. Those useful post-apocalyptic people will have enough to worry about without a pile of undercooked schlub on their plates. Seems like the least I could do is manage to be tender.
Permalink | No CommentsOnce again, a computer has shown me how old I’ve become.
Only this wasn’t some fancy age-guessing gizmo or wrinkle detector or snarky ‘Hot or Not?‘ server not progammed to compensate for troubled chicks with unresolved daddy issues.
(Or Joe Piscopo issues, from what I’m told. Or Tim Curry issues, wherever the hell that came from. Or Fozzy the Bear issues.
As a matter of fact, I’m starting to wonder if these Hot-or-Not Bots are actually programmed for anything good at all.)
No. This time, it’s my very own laptop computer that’s pointed out my decrepitude. Not intentionally, perhaps — but it’s highlighted something I’ve long known about us humans: we tend to lose our coolness over time. And mine is dripping out, sloughing off or falling apart on me at an alarming rate. Including this evening, when I thought I was doing something simple on my laptop.
See, I needed to make a little video short. Nothing fancy, just a few sentences of explanation, a couple of jokes, say goodnight, Gracie, and that’s that. Only it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything, because for the life of me I couldn’t get comfortable staring at the little light next to the laptop’s built-in cam and talking. It simply wouldn’t work.
Now mind you, I’m not one of those people with phobias about speaking in public. Or speaking in private, then broadcasting to the public. I’ve been a standup comic and a radio DJ and acted in a handful of plays. All at the amateur level, of course — but that only further proves my point. If I were actually good enough to get paid for any of those things, then naturally I’d be brimming with confidence about them. The fact that no one’s ever told me to ‘quit your day job’ — except the people actually employing me at my day job, occasionally — and yet still willing to yammer on regardless demonstrates a real lack of fear about public humiliation. Or a really stupid-steep learning curve. Or some unfortunate sad fetish that I don’t want to think too hard about.
(Frankly, I can’t imagine a fetish that involves getting off on publicly sticking your foot in your mouth.
I can imagine all kinds of them that involves sticking your foot in someone else’s mouth. I don’t have any of those fetishes, but I can imagine them. That’s all.
Then again, I’m not a Jets fan.)
The point is, I wasn’t nervous about making this little video. Just uncomfortable, and I couldn’t figure out why — until I thought of my grandfather.
My grandfather was old. At some point, back before I knew him he might have been young, but by the time we were formally introduced — oooooold. He also came from a different time, back before computers and gadgets and newfangled doohickeys complicated the sort of life he was accustomed to leading. And he had the same sort of trouble that I had tonight. Not that you’d have gotten him within thirty feet of a laptop computer. He didn’t have trouble talking to webcams. His problem was talking to drive-throughs.
“I just wanted a damned cheeseburger and maybe some fries, and I wanted them without hearing — again — how my mother’s father climbed a thousand-foot peak barefoot every morning to pick mustard seeds or Horsey sauce or whatever the hell it was he was on about”
Back when and where Grandpa grew up, you talked to people, If someone made you a sandwich, you looked him in the eye, took it from him with one hand and paid him your cash or shook his hand with the other. Better yet, you made your own sandwich — after pitching in to help butcher the meat, make the bread, and pick the vegetables. You helped yourself, and if things weren’t easy, well at least they were honest. You knew who you could depend on, and where those meals were made and who made them and where all the parts came from. You put in hard work, got your three squares a day, and you got up the next day and did it again. And that’s how things ought to be, damn it.
I know all of this because Gramps would tell me so. Constantly. He would also, if prompted, tell the flunky manning the local Wendy’s drive-through window. Where ‘prompted’ means asked, over an anonymous faceless intercom:
‘Welcome to Wendy’s, sir or ma’am — how about a Junior Bacon Frosty with your meal today?‘
Only he wouldn’t talk back through the microphone. He’d drive around and deliver his spiel while staring the poor kid down through the spick-up window — as though this sixteen-year-old minimum wager were responsible for the entire drive-through concept. Like the pimply schlub gaping back at him had installed the machine, demanded its use, and sat at the second window like some modern-day Wizard of Oz — pay no attention to the man behind the sliding glass pane! — until Gramps came along to lift the grease-spotted veil from society’s eyes and expose the fraud.
I was always mortified, of course. I just wanted a damned cheeseburger and maybe some fries, and I wanted them without hearing — again — how my mother’s father climbed a thousand-foot peak barefoot every morning to pick mustard seeds or Horsey sauce or whatever the hell it was he was on about. And the kid didn’t deserve this kind of treatment; it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t bright enough to get a good summer job.
But now I understand Gramps’ tirades. It was never about the kids, in particular. He just needed someone to mouth off to, because he wasn’t comfortable talking to a machine. He always told me he didn’t feel right ordering from a ‘squawk box’; more than that, he couldn’t even bitch to one. So he pulled around the corner and laid into the first poor paper-hatted pipsquawk he found. It just seemed to mean more, when there was someone squirming on the other end.
And that was my problem tonight. There are kids out there podcasting and vlogging and waxing poetic to nothing more than a circuit board and a cheap plastic lens — but I couldn’t do it. I’ve gotten old, like Grandpa, and it just didn’t feel right. Oh, I can still order off a video menu screen at a fast food joint — because I grew up with those — but otherwise, I seem to have lost the ability to chat comfortably with no one. I can talk to myself. I can have conversations with the dog. But talking to nobody?
I guess I’m just too old for that.
Still, I had to get this video made, which was a bit of a pickle. I could barely get halfway through it without feeling self-conscious and trailing off, but it was also something I had to do alone. No audience, other than the eventual, over-the-wire kind, was forthcoming. I knew what I had to do.
I pulled out an old family album, found a picture of old Grandpa, and scanned it on my combo printer. (Because I’m not entirely useless with this newfangled gizmo crap, thank you very much.) I blew it up, cropped down to his face, and printed Gramps back out onto a full sheet of paper. Which I then taped to my laptop screen just under the camera, punched ‘Record’ and smoked through my script. Talking ‘to Grandpa’ all the way. I think he might have appreciated being used to get around having to talk to some impersonal cold piece of equipment as a proxy for real listeners.
Either that, or he’d drag me off to Best Buy to rail at some Geek Squad dropout about the very idea of webcams, and how dare the guy expect us to chitchat with a bunch of electronical doohickeys when there are salads to plant and fancy ketchup to harvest and buffalo chickens to feed and slaughter and cook?
That’s Grandpa for you, all right. I know how you feel, old man. I know how you feel.
Permalink | No CommentsWell, this is awkward. The very next day after experiencing a bout of social unpreparedness, I had the exact opposite happen. I was absolutely locked in and ready to interact with other humans — greetings rehearsed, pants on, fly zipped, psychotic ramblings muted to a bare minimum — and whoosh, my social calendar was whisked clean like a magician yanking the cloth off a dinner table. And now here I am with this stupid naked table and a useless place setting and fully zipped pants, and the snooty waiter won’t even acknowledge my metaphorically-speaking existence. Here’s how it happened:
I recently reconnected with two old friends that I hadn’t seen in a while — a guy I used to work with a few years ago, and a girl who used to also tell jokes in many of the same dingy shitholes I frequented during my standup days. It was pure coincidence that I touched base with both of them in quick succession; they were friends from completely separate activities — and degrees of soberness — and so far as I know, never met each other. It was then a supreme coincidence that we scheduled to meet up on the very same day — with him at one of our old lunch haunts, and with her for drinks at one of the aforementioned dingy shitholes. That day was today. Hence the pants, and the careful fly zippage.
I was quite excited to see both these pals again. Because… er, well. The guy and I used to scribble gibberish on the walls together in our old office, and the girl once cast me as a perpetually stinky character who’s brutally suffocated to death in a short film she was producing.
So we’re… um, you know, tight. Or something.
(Hey, given my usual level of social interactions, that practically makes these people godparents to my children.
If I were ever going to have children. Which I’m not. Because that’d just be fricking more people on the planet I’d have to deal with. No, thanks.)
“We’d traded emails, chatting about the usual stuff — abdominal injuries, elephant genitalia, shrink-rayed tiny little pickles.”
Anyway, I was all gussied up and ready to reminisce about old times with these folks. We’d traded emails, chatting about the usual stuff — abdominal injuries, elephant genitalia, shrink-rayed tiny little pickles. But seeing them in person was going to be a real hoot.
(Seeing the people in person, that is. Not the topics of conversation. I don’t need to see any of those things up close, ever. I don’t care how zipped my pants are.)
So just as I’m getting ready to head out for lunch, I get a phone call. It’s the guy, and he’s not feeling well and can’t make it, after all. Bummer.
Ten minutes later — as if they’d conspired to kick me in the miniature pickles while I’m down — I get an email from the girl. Also sick. Unable to get out, and could I take a dingy shithole rain check? Well, meh.
As the coincidences piled up and humped each other in a corner, I was left with no lunch or evening plans whatsoever. Now, I’ll go easy on the two people involved. They’re not feeling well, obviously — and there’s a chance that one of them could read this — so I’ll simply hope that they get better and that we can catch up as planned soon.
(I won’t spend any space here conjecturing about what sort of STDs health conditions each of them may have. Or whether they gave them to each other.
Because that would be wrong.)
In the meantime, I’ll double-check my deodorant and go over the emails we traded. I don’t remember saying anything inflammatory to either of them — though I suppose if I sent the tiny pickle reference to the pachyderm wang one, and vice versa… hoo boy. I suppose that would cause a bit of a stir. But I don’t think that happened. I’m pretty good at keeping my ridiculous topics and the proper recipients in order.
(I can’t balance a checkbook or remember where I park the car at the grocery store, but this I can do. Talk about your ‘non-marketable skills’.)
The message I’m taking from all of this — as usual — is that there’s simply no way to win here. Be socially unprepared, and the world parties around you — whether you really want them to or not. Gird your social loins for action, and you’ll wind up with an empty dance card, no action, and loins all girded up for nothing.
But at least your pants will be zipped. If you’re lucky. I guess that’s something.
Permalink | 2 CommentsThe Boy Scouts have a motto. Perhaps you’re familiar with it: Be prepared.
Yeah. How nice. I was never a Boy Scout.
I was a Cub Scout for a while. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a motto. We were a bunch of nine-year-olds who weren’t allowed to tie our own neckerchief knots yet. If the Cub Scouts have a motto, it’s nothing as noble or vigilant as “Be prepared”. It’s probably “Put on clean underpants once in a while”, or “Stop eating all the damned cookies; those are for the whole troop!”
For a brief time, I was also something called a ‘Webelo’, which stands for We‘ll Be Loyal scouts.
Evidently, all that other stuff Boy Scouts are supposed to be — friendly, cheerful, thrifty, brave, (I forget the rest), punctual, conciliatory, jovial, tall, (I’m just making shit up now), hypoallergenic, circumsized, Peruvian, combustible, all the rest — is okay to pick up later on. But loyal, they teach you right up front. That’s the most important trait a good Scout can have, and the Webelos exist to hammer it home like a tent peg into soft campground peat.
“If the Cub Scouts have a motto, it’s nothing as noble or vigilant as “Be prepared”. It’s probably “Put on clean underpants once in a while”, or “Stop eating all the damned cookies; those are for the whole troop!””
I lasted maybe two weeks. So clearly the indoctrination didn’t take. Basically, I found out there were no badges or awards given for rocking the high score on Gauntlet at the arcade or cramming more Funyuns in your mouth than anyone else, and I took a hike. But not a real hike. And not with Webelos. (“Wizard gets bored… EASILY!“)
(You old-school Gauntlet jockeys will get that reference. The good old 8-bit days, eh? How I miss ’em.)
Anyway, I never made it to Scout initiation, where they drag you out of bed in the middle of the night and drop you naked in the middle of the woods with just a compass and a soggy packet of Zesta crackers to get you home.
(Maybe that’s not the Boy Scouts, come to think of it. Could be the Navy Seals. Or the Salvation Army. Sierra Club, maybe?
I’m always getting my armed forces mixed up.)
Still, since my fledgling Scout days, I’ve done what I can to ‘Be prepared’. I just never had the proper training to be prepared in all possible ways — whether the situation calls for repelling a hungry bear (with soggy Zestas, presumably); starting a fire using only dried moss, sharpened flints and thinner-soaked rags from dozens of failed ‘Artistic Badge’ projects; or sewing little bits of fabric onto a long green sash and then putting that sash on in public as though you really wear that sort of dubious thing every day and it’s all the kids in jeans and T-shirts standing around you laughing and pointing who are really the weird ones, and here, have some cookies. It’s okay. We can always make another batch for the rest of the troop, champ.
So while I can physically prepare myself for a tough situation — by playing dead in staff meetings, say, or drinking heavily before the in-laws come over — and I can sometimes manage to mentally ‘be prepared’ — I’ve trained myself to shout “I NEED AN ADULT!” when I feel threatened, and I’ve almost managed to memorize that 9-1-… something number that people are always chittering about — there are definitely gaps in my being preparedness repertoire.
Take tonight, for instance. It’s Monday. I had a long day at work, got pooped out entirely, and was ready to shuffle home and slip into my footie pajamas, grab a pint of rocky road and snuggle under a blanket on the couch dozing off to Friends reruns.
Or, you know, the version of that which preserves some tiny shred of my masculinity.
(Would it help if the ice cream was butter pecan? How about if the pajamas have a Superman emblem? One of the episodes has Ross’ hot ex-wife who turned out to be a lesbian. Do I get points for that? Something? Hello?)
At any rate, I was looking forward to a nice quiet night off. But no. Late in the workday, I was reminded that I’d promised to go hang out tonight with a few of the guys. Drink a few beers, watch the basketball game, have some yuks. Only I had no yuks left in me. I was all yukked out.
In other words, I was socially unprepared to deal with the evening. Not like a Boy Scout. I bet those kids can booze it up and yuk it off and party like Woodsy the E-dropping Owl at the drop of a hat. Not me, sadly. I’m old, and I never had the training. I’m afraid I’ve had the ‘prepared’ beaten out of me.
So I joined up with the crowd, but never really got into the festivities. And as soon as I could extricate myself, I excused my yukless carcass and wandered home. I just couldn’t prep myself for an unexpected bit of socialness. I don’t know what badge that would have been — ‘The Butterfly’, maybe, or ‘Chatty Cathy’ — but it would have been a big damned help for me tonight. I spent an hour or two on the outside looking in, then beat a path straight home to my door.
And my couch, where I now sit. Footie pajamas, check. Ice cream scoop, at the ready. It’s a little later than I’d hoped, and I’m drained even more now — but I’ve got the TV remote in hand. If I can find ‘Smelly Cat’ or the one with Ross’ white teeth, then I’ll sit here all night basking — finally — in a little R & R.
And that’s something I’m quite ‘prepared’ to do.
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