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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Later this afternoon, the missus and I are setting off with a few friends on a ski trip.
Only I don’t ski.
Oh, I’ve worn skis, sure. I’ve slapped them onto my feet, taken a chair lift to the top of a gently-inclined bunny slope and let gravity have its way with me. But at no time did any of my falling, flailing, stumbling, tripping, faceplanting, leg wrenching or furious cursing resemble ‘skiing’ in the slightest.
(I believe I may have briefly qualified as a mogul when a pack of eight year olds took turns jumping my flattened carcass splayed on the middle of a hill. But at best, that makes me a ‘ski-ee’, not so much a ski-er’.)
“Taking up snowboarding because you can’t ski is like climbing Everest because you fell off a Stairmaster.”
This wasn’t a one-time deal, mind you. I gave skiing several good shots over the course of a few years, and each time spent more time face-down in snow than on my feet and ‘shushing’. I’ve sucked down more fresh powder than Gary Busey on a weeklong Thai bender. I know when I’m licked. And skiing’s spittle is still dripping off my socks, several winters later. So I’m done. Kaput. Sworn it off.
(In an inexplicable spasm of poor judgment — which is to say, spousal arm twisting — I decided a couple of years ago to try snowboarding instead. Because this is the sort of thing that idiots do.
Taking up snowboarding because you can’t ski is like climbing Everest because you fell off a Stairmaster. I still spent the day making involuntary snow angels, but at a much higher rate of speed, and with my feet basically shackled together. There’s a reason that ‘snowboarding’ and ‘waterboarding’ are such similar words.)
So, it’s a ‘ski trip’ for everyone else. For me, it’s a ‘sleep late, build a fire, booze it up and treat the wounded trip’. Frankly, I like the sound of mine better. Though it might be tougher to get printed on a T-shirt.
I may tinker with some other winter pastimes while I’m there — snowshoeing, flagpole licking, writing my name in the snow, the usual — but I have zero plans to slap overgrown toothpicks on my feet, plummet down a hill, or ride in a scary open one-way ferris wheel car. I’m parking my ass in the ‘beer chalet’ tonight, and staying in close proximity to the suds fridge until it’s time to mosey home on Sunday.
And if that plan ends up with me face down in the snow again… well, at least this time maybe I’ll enjoy the fall a little more. When it comes to skiing, I’d call that progress.
Permalink | 4 CommentsMy dog is constantly finding new ways to embarrass me.
Our new(-ish, now) condo is located on a nice little residential street, with brownstones and apartments and small parks in most directions. To the right, a five-minute walk or so past the small local library, we have easy access to a bustling neighborhood intersection with shops, restaurants and public transportation. That’s also the only direction I’ve found, within a several-block radius, to feature an available public trash can.
So when I’m walking the dog, does she walk toward the right?
No. The dog, recalcitrant hellbeast that she is, wants to walk anywhere out the door that’s not ‘toward the right’. She’s happy to go left. Eager to bound straight across the street and down the avenue beyond. Around the corner, behind the building, up in a balloon, down a mine shaft toward the earth’s molten core — these are all agreeable destinations for the dog, because they can in no way, shape or form be confused with ‘toward the right’. Or the trash can.
Instead, she’s interested in trekking off to the far corners of the neighborhood, sniffing bushes and peeing on hydrants where no dog has sniffed or peed before. And pooping. Lord, the pooping. Something about our daily constitutional limbers up the old canine intestines, because when she’s ready to let fly — look out. And the farther we walk, the more prodigious the poops.
(I understand this, to a degree. I’ve heard — and follow personally — the old advice, “Don’t shit where you sleep.” I’m not arguing that.
But the mutt appears to be on a mission to “don’t shit where you’ve ever slept, might sleep, once yawned, or could drive to on a single tank of gas.” And that’s excessive, in my pooping book.)
So now I’m forced to trudge back to the condo carrying a bag of fresh warm mutt plop. That’s no picnic, in and of itself. Cost of cohabitating a slobbering idiot little fuzzball for reasons that escape me at the moment, I figure.
(And yes, by the way, I do often impose my will on the pooch and insist — nay, compel — that we walk to the right, toward the trash. Much tugging and pulling and dragging and stubborn sitting and glaring ensues. But I get my way and dammit, we walk to the right, when I say so.
“Six miles away, and the dog can fill a Hefty bag with recycled horse meat and cereal filler. In the shadow of a garbage bin — and miffed off at me for interrupting her route? Nary a turdlet.”
Mind you, we never do any actual pooping when we go to the right, out of some sort of scorned puppy spite I haven’t conquered. Six miles away, and the dog can fill a Hefty bag with recycled horse meat and cereal filler. In the shadow of a garbage bin — and miffed off at me for interrupting her route? Nary a turdlet.
And I know she’s just saving them up for the back room. Conniving little bitch knows how to stockpile ammo. Clever girl.)
Hefting the poop bag back home like a satanic Santa’s sack full of scat isn’t the worst part, though. I don’t want that thing in the house — and if it’s been an especially long walk, I’m not entirely sure it’ll fit through the door. So I drop the dog inside and head out — to the right — to deposit the bag in a proper outdoor trash receptacle.
This is invariably where I run into someone in the neighborhood who wants to ‘chat’. Could be an upstairs neighbor, or the lady next door, or some busybody from down the block. Whoever it is, it’s as though there’s a sign strapped around my neck with big neon letters screaming:
“HI! PLEASE TALK TO ME RIGHT NOW, WHILE I’M HOLDING A STEAMING BAG FULL OF POOP! DON’T BE SHY!”
And there’s simply no way you can ‘play off’ walking down the street in your neighborhood, sans pet, and carrying a fresh sack of shit. It can’t be done. Take the exchange I had following an after-work walk last night:
Woman: Hi there! We’re your new neighbors across the street, and wanted to say hello. I’m Amanda; this is my daughter, Zoe.
Me: Hi, great to meet you both — welcome. My name is-
Zoe: Hey, mister! What’s that in your hand?
Me: Uhm… big bag of turds.
Zoe: What kinda turds?
Me: Doggie turds.
Woman: But… there’s no dog with you.
Me: Er… no, ma’am.
Woman: …
Me: …
Woman: Zoe, come stand behind Mommy. We’re going to practice our ‘backing away from wacko strangers’ now, okay? Don’t forget the screaming, pumpkin.
Leave it to the mutt to turn the whole neighborhood against me, before I even have the opportunity to do it myself. These people never even gave me a chance.
On the bright side — if I ever want to get revenge by leaving a flaming bag of something on their porch, I’ll have plenty of ammunition. Especially if they live to the left of us.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve decided I need a bread delivery service.
It’s not that I eat an exorbitant amount of bread, mind you. I don’t have some pathological ‘bread thing’; You won’t find me sitting naked in the tub packed ass-deep in challah and Parker House rolls, cackling like the Pillsbury Dough Boy on acid.
“I don’t have some pathological ‘bread thing’; You won’t find me sitting naked in the tub packed ass-deep in challah and Parker House rolls, cackling like the Pillsbury Dough Boy on acid.”
(Well, you won’t if I remember to lock the damned bathroom door, anyway. Does nobody knock these days, or what?)
In fact, I’m pretty ambivalent about bread when its available. I’m happy enough to nibble on nan or sample a precocious brioche, but it’s not something I’d write home about. Or write here about. Me and bread, we’re strictly platonic.
Or so I thought.
What I’ve come to realize is that bread is not just the linchpin of my nightly dinner plans, but pretty much the key to my entire evening. It’s that important. But it’s just bread. My mind and various digestive organs boggle at the concept.
(I wouldn’t recommend trying that at home, by the way. Boggling your pancreas, for instance, takes years of practice. Intestinal boggling in particular should only be attempted only under the supervision of a licensed physician.
And ideally near a bathroom. Obviously.)
Here’s the thing about bread — I’m a lazy, lazy human being. Also an occasionally hungry one, and I often wind up fending for myself for dinner. Which leaves me three choices for food:
#1. Go out for dinner.
Not an option. After a hard day of desperate sobbing under the desk in my office, once I’m home, I’m home. You want to get me back out of the house, you’d better bring the jaws of life, a chloroformed rag and a team of Clydesdales, because otherwise — no, sir. Once the volatile elements ‘mycouch-ium’ and ‘myass-ium’ come in contact, they form an unbreakable molecular bond that lasts… well, at least through the Seinfeld reruns after the local news. Sometimes longer.
Technically, I suppose I could pick up dinner on the way home. But that’s asking me to plan ahead, to have money ready, to know what kind of food I want, and to deviate from the beeline home to which my couch-pining hindquarters is accustomed. What am I, Tony Stark? That’s superhero talk there, that is.
#2. Order food online.
I specified ‘online’ because while it’s physically possible for me to order via phone, it’s just not ever going to happen. I mean, phone calling is so passe — who actually talks to other human beings any more? How very twentieth century.
Instead, I log into my favorite local foodie site, send my avatar over to order from some delivery company’s logo, which sends an automated text to the restaurant’s account, where a headless chat client picks it up and tweets it to the kitchen so the robotic arm can bluetooth the microwave to nuke my damned cheeseburger already. It’s all very efficient, and quick, and coldly impersonal in its Rube Goldbergian way.
Of course, ordering out all the time gets expensive, and the food isn’t maybe as healthy as it could be. Also, the automated driverless delivery cars tend to try to run you over if you don’t tip well, which is not so great. But it’s still a helluva lot easier than trying to:
#3. Make my own dinner.
This is where bread is so diabolically crucial. I’m a guy. I’m not all that coordinated, I didn’t grow up in California, and I didn’t go to culinary school. Therefore, I’m only capable of making four dishes. And three of them are sandwiches.
(The fourth is lobster thermidor, due to an odd set of circumstances involving a buddy who worked on the docks, a very special Good Eats episode, and losing a bet to this Francophilic jackass I went to college with.
But making that gets pretty damned expensive, too. And where’s a guy like me gonna find fresh thermidor around here, anyway?)
The point being: if there’s bread in the house, I can be reasonably self-sufficient for dinner. I can whip up a sandwich in no time — which is important, since I’ve sworn off any food that takes longer for me to prepare than to eat — with no problem, and go on my merry couch-bonding way.
But if no bread? Then I’m cooked. I’ve got nothing. There could be groceries and produce and exotic spices from all corners of the globe in the pantry, but they do me no good. I only know how to put them together with bread. Observe:
Tuna fish + bread = sandwich
Sliced turkey + pickles + bread = sandwich
Oregano flakes + frozen waffle + cheese + bread = sandwich
Jalapeno pepper + powdered lemonade + raw turnips + bread = sandwich… + nightmares, and possibly an eventual stomach pump, but still — sandwich
But tuna fish + bread – bread = …what, exactly? Cat food? Fish dandruff? A two-ounce tin can of smelly fail? I’m simply not equipped to solve that kind of equation. My abacus doesn’t go to eleven.
So bread is a must, unless I want to order seventeen pizzas a week for the rest of my natural eating life. And I don’t. I already feel like I owe the delivery guy a Christmas card, as often as he’s over. He doesn’t speak much English, but I’m pretty sure he made me his kid’s godfather last week. It could be a sign to cut back, just a smidge.
My solution is bread delivery. I figure a couple of loaves every week will do it, just to make sure I’ve got sandwich fixings available. I can freeze a couple down, maybe hide one under my pillow for emergencies, and I ought to be just fine. If the alternatives are to learn to cook, to fund the pensions at the local Domino’s, or to starve, then this seems like the only viable option.
Because I don’t want to starve.
Permalink | No CommentsToday is Presidents’ Day here in the US, which is perhaps the fake holiday hardest of all for me to get behind. I’ll explain why, in three easy reasons:
“I’ll applaud and thank and offer a warm hearty hug to anyone who fought a war for me, or planted a bunch of fruit trees, or collated my TPS reports, or pooped me clawing and screaming into this world.”
Reason One: It moves.
Look, if we’re going to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, then fine. The towns can dress their kids up with wooden teeth and axes stained with the sap of innocent cherry trees, and have a ball. On February 22nd. When the man was born.
(According to the modern Gregorian calendar, anyway. When little Georgie actually squeezed out of Mother Washington back in the twelve-hundreds or whenever, they were using some different calendar based on zodiac signs or Roman gods or how long it took dinosaur dung to compose or something. So his birthday actually officially changed dates, when he was around twenty years old.
Which is just one more reason to stop waving it around on the calendar. It’s been through quite enough already.)
Now, if we’re going to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday instead, then we can all run out to the local stovepipe hat store, put on our fake beards, proclaim emancipation and get shot in the back of the head while we’re watching some boring stuffy play our wife dragged us out to — which we’ve probably all wished for at some point in our lives, but Lincoln was the only one of us man enough to do it. I can respect that. Even celebrate it.
On February 12th, on the man’s birthday.
This “Presidents’ Day” nonsense is nothing but a bet-hedger. Somebody back when was worried that the Lincoln fans would be all up in arms if Washington alone got the honors, or that the Washington waggers wouldn’t share the stage with Team Lincoln, and they split the difference. Now it’s the third Monday of each February, rain or shine, the actual date be damned. That’s diplomacy, I guess.
But that sure as hell doesn’t make it a holiday.
Reason Two: It’s a day for who, now?
Let me say this right up front: I have no problem with designating a day to honor deserving individuals. And we’ve got a bunch, to be sure — Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, Veterans’ Day, Firefighters’ Day, Military Spouses’ Day, Administrative Professionals’ Day, Nurses’ Day, I’m Not Making This Up Day, Okay I Totally Just Made the Last One Up Day, Son and Daughter Day, Good Neighbor Day, Johnny Appleseed Day, even Frankenstein Day, for the love of Abby Normal.
I’m fine with all of those. And I’m fine with the two Tuesdays in mid-June that are apparently the only fricking days left not dedicated to some body, group, profession or reanimated stitched-together monster. All of the above are worthy celebratees, and deserve our thanks, admiration, respect — and possibly a bride with a highlighted Don King hairdo.
But presidents? Seriously?
Let’s be honest, here. What do U.S. presidents to date have in common? They’re a bunch of unimaginably powerful, uber-wealthy, well-fed, well-protected, usually pompous, sometimes bright, mostly-white stuffy old guys who were carried into the office based on fancy speeches, skillful pandering, back-room deals, or that really funny movie they made that one time with the monkey.
I’m not sure we need to spend a day to honor that. And I’m pretty certain they don’t need it from us.
I’m just saying. I’ll applaud and thank and offer a warm hearty hug to anyone who fought a war for me, or planted a bunch of fruit trees, or collated my TPS reports, or pooped me clawing and screaming into this world. But a guy who bathes in government T-bills and can ride the Secretary of Defense naked through the Green Room like some rodeo pony if he wants to? Who’s that helping, really? Pass.
Reason the Third: I worked all day.
In the end, the worst kind of holiday is the kind that everyone else gets but me. And I was stuck in the office all damned day, because I didn’t have it off.
(And the secretary did, so I’ve been collating my own TPS reports all afternoon. Swing low!)
So everything else above is just bullshit, of course. I’d celebrate the Second Coming of zombie Jim Varney* on every waning crescent moon in the month of Baramhat, if it meant I could sleep til ten on a Monday. But today I was up, at ’em, and in the office like any other desk-shackled week.
Any chance I can get a do-over? Don’t we have Secretaries of the Interior Day or Mothra Day or James K. Polk’s wedding anniversary or something coming up?
Anything?
* For the record, the First Coming of zombie Jim Varney was quite brief:
“Hey, Vern! NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM!!”
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Something That May Have Hatched from Green Eggs, and Spam
Starting with the spam.
I wanted to warn anyone who may want to leave a comment around here — and commenters always welcome! Step right up; no lines, no waiting! — that I did a bit of tinkering on the comment script, to stem the tsunami of spam comments that have been slipping past the goalie.
You see, I left the site hanging out for the better part of two years — with comments turned off for much of that time — while the rest of the interwebs (including the mass marketing weasels) continued to evolve. And I haven’t updated any code since I came back and flipped the lights back on. Which means I’m now blogging with the software equivalent of a pointy stick, scratching on a damp cave wall. On the battlefield of spam management, I’m a cute little bunny rabbit sitting in no man’s land.
“If you should try to comment and receive any message that contains the word ‘bitchslappify‘ — oh, you’ll know the one — please shoot me an email to tell me I’m an idiot.”
(And I don’t mean a vicious Holy Grail bunny, or even a Bugs ‘escape by a whisker’ Bunny.
I’m talking about one of those glassy-eyed inbred pet store rabbits that wouldn’t know its cotton tail from a rattlesnake’s nest in the ground — the kind where you’d put a carrot under a box with a string tied to it and think, ‘this is too cliche; it’s never going to work’, but this bunny would say, ‘OMG CARRUTS LOL!!!1eleventy!’ and hop right in, because it’s just that stupid. That kind of bunny.)
Yesterday, I awoke to 300+ ‘comments’ that bested my Stone Age filters, and another couple thousand that managed to get themselves red-flagged. And sending those bastard ads back to the fiery depths of hell is not the sort of ‘blogging’ that I came back to do. So I tinkered.
And it’s helped — this morning, there was one — just one — measly little spamment lurking in the inbox. So the problem’s not ‘solved’, but at least maybe now I’m working with papyrus, or chipping away at stone blocks. I can work with that.
But the last time I ‘tinkered’, I made an unfortunate typo and basically made it so that no one could comment, anywhere, ever. So please: If you should try to comment and receive any message that contains the word ‘bitchslappify‘ — oh, you’ll know the one — please shoot me an email to tell me I’m an idiot.
Again. And stuck in the stone ages, at least until I can pull in some software released after the Carter administration. Many graciases in advance.
While I’m here, I’ll share a quick snippet that happened to me earlier in the week. I was out at a local watering hole ‘n’ grill where I’ve eaten a few times before, and — without glancing at the menu — asked for the ‘chicken cutlet sandwich’.
(Because that’s what I do. Yesterday, I said bread wasn’t a ‘thing’ with me. Chicken cutlet sandwiches are, evidently. We all have our delicious crosses to bear.)
The waitress — lovely girl, very helpful and patient — then proceeded to describe, in some detail, that what they serve isn’t actually a ‘chicken cutlet’ sandwich, but rather a breaded chicken patty. And point by point, she elucidated the difference and the relative merits of each from both aesthetic and gastronomical viewpoints. It was quite illuminating. When she finished, I nodded and said:
“Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, really. But if I were the kind of person who could appreciate the difference between ‘cutlet’ and ‘patty’, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be ordering here in the first place. Frankly, I’ll be impressed if the thing’s actually made of chicken.”
I had the good sense to leave out my very favorite and oft-repeated advice from Krusty the Clown when considering such matters: ‘Think smaller. More legs.‘ But the waitress seemed taken aback, maybe even a little offended at my characterization of the cuisine.
(For the record, I’m not off base here. Out of line, maybe. But when everything on the menu comes with fries, and the fries are as likely to come intermingled with onion ring batter, skinny fishsticks, ‘chicken’ patty crumbs or what appear to be deep-fried cigarette butts — not off base.)
Anyway, I’m happy to report that the waitress did get back to me with the meal. And my breaded mystery meat, saliva, dishwater and lettuce sandwich — compliments of the chef, don’t you know — was simply delicious.
Even better than my usual chicken cutlet sandwich, even. Hey, maybe that waitress really does know her stuff.
Permalink | 3 CommentsCategories: Awkward Conversations, Bits About Blogging, Foodstuff Fluff
Tags: chicken patty, comedy, comments, fun, funny, humor, sandwich, spam