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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Getting to work isn’t nearly as easy as it used to be.
I drive to the office, and my commute takes just about twenty minutes from door to door. Or rather, it used to. For three years, barring the occasional traffic snafu or detour, I’d hop in the car, spend my third of an hour warbling along with the tunes on the CD player, and arrive at my parking area. Day in, day out, same old commute. Then one day, I thought, ‘You know, I bet there’s a faster way.‘
That was my first mistake.
Not that I was wrong, mind you. There was a faster way. Lots of them, as it turns out, which was no real surprise. I have the navigational instincts of a crack-addled mole rat, so when I’m told or shown a route that gets me from Point A to Point B, then that’s how I get there. I don’t ask questions, I don’t cut corners, and I sure as hell don’t take any detours. If the directions tell me to turn left six times consecutively and cross the same intersection on Main Street over and over, then that’s just how it is. If I eventually get where I’m going, then the experiment is a success. Period.
“Luckily, there’s more than one way to skin a Cadillac.”
So, one day I decided to venture forth on a new path to the office. I knew the intervening area well enough by that time that I couldn’t get ‘lost’, per se, but that doesn’t mean I knew what the hell I was doing. As usual. The first ‘shortcut’ was an unmitigated disaster. I took a little side street to cut off a right angle, got funneled onto a one-way street going the opposite direction, and lost ten minutes trying to get back to my usual route. Total driving time to work: 35 minutes.
The next day, I cruised past that little snafu waiting to happen, and took the next side street. Boston can be a tricky town to navigate, but if there’s one rule around here, it’s that they never put two one-way streets going the same way in a row. You can always go a little further and loop back the way you came. So I made the next turn.
It also funneled me into a one-way street. Going the wrong way. And I couldn’t loop back and go the way I came. At least I remembered how to get back to my usual route from the previous day’s adventure. As I cursed the city planners, wishing for large cloverleaf onramps to be shoved firmly up their asses, my total driving time to work was: 25 minutes.
I took a step back and reassessed my plans. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to cut off the angle I’d been trying to shave. There were a couple more side streets I could have tried, but what were the chances those would work out? Zero. Those were all one-ways the wrong way, too, or led to dead end cul-de-sacs or tar pits or tiger cages or something. No, thanks. If I was going to cut time off the commute, I’d have to do it elsewhere.
So I looked closer to home. Before I got into the meat of the route with that big right angle, I traveled on a couple of busy roads near my house. What if I could zigzag a shortcut through the back streets there? Surely, that would save me a couple of minutes. And that’s two more minutes I could be sleeping every morning. I had to try.
First, I veered into a little alleyway off the main road, knowing there was a street parallel to my route that wasn’t nearly as busy. What I failed to realize is that it’s less busy because there are stop lights every nine feet or so on that road, and they’re always red. Always. Even when they’re green, if they see you coming, they slam over to red. They don’t even bother with yellow; they just say, ‘Aha, drivers hoping to get by! No green for you! and it’s *bzzzzzzt*, right to crimson. Sometimes, I swear they even blink a little, just to mock you. I tried for a week to beat the lights, but my best driving time to work was: 28 minutes.
Luckily, there’s more than one way to skin a Cadillac. All sorts of other little alleys and thruways veered off that main street. One of them had to take me somewhere useful — and faster. Right? Well, here’s the tally:
Second turn: Alleyway dumping into another one-way street going the wrong way. Can’t somebody outlaw these fricking things? Total driving time: 31 minutes.
Third turn: Driveway into Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Thought there’d be a way out the back; there wasn’t. Total driving time: 26 minutes. But the crullers were delicious.
Fourth turn: Street back to stop light hell. One light turned red, then yellow, then immediately back to red. I took a right turn to get away from the nightmare. Onto another one-way street. Kill me now. Total driving time: 38 minutes.
Fifth turn: Some guy’s driveway. He didn’t seem too happy to see me, and wouldn’t let me drive through his back yard to the next street. Maybe I should have saved him a cruller. Total driving time: 25 minutes.
Sixth turn: The turn I take on my usual route. Le sigh.
Just this week, I turned to my last resort. Between my parking area — just a street with several open spaces, actually — and the main part of the route, there’s a bit of a hike on a street with two stop signs. Maybe I could shortcut past those — or one of them. Or just start blowing through one to save a few seconds. I’d take just about anything at this point.
After careful study of this part of the drive, I targeted one little side street that looked promising. It pointed the way I wanted to go, and as far as I could see down it, there were no stop signs, snarky lights or one way pointers to screw me. Yesterday, I took the plunge and ventured into the unknown.
For a block, it was smooth sailing. Two blocks, no problem. Three blocks, fine. And I was making super time. At the end of the fourth block was the turn onto the street where I parked. I had victory in sight when I glanced to my left, at the house at the end of the block. On the sidewalk there was an older woman, probably in her fifties, and quite heavy. She was shoveling the snow from the night before off her walk, wearing just a too-revealing pair of hip-hugging sweatpants and a thin white T-shirt. On the shirt, emblazoned across her ample, lumpy chest were the words:
‘Got Milk?‘
Clearly, I can never travel on that street again. If that’s what the lady wears in wintertime, god only knows what she’s parading around in come summer. Also, I won’t be drinking any milk for the next couple of weeks, thanks just the same. And who knows how long it took me to get to work that day; I drove around in circles for a good ten minutes before I felt stable enough to park.
Circles on the next block over, mind you. No way did I need to see Ms. Shovelcrack and her milky mammaries again. Not then. Not ever.
Still, all was not lost. Today, I took my usual route, like I always do, onto the busy street, through the right angle, past the stop signs and onto my parking street. And then I parked — four spots earlier than I usually park. Total driving time: 19 minutes, 50 seconds.
Sure, that’s an extra minute or two added onto my walk into the office. But it’s not driving time, now, is it? Sometimes the small victories are all we have, and I’m more than happy to take this one. I’ll worry about shaving seconds off my walking commute some other time. Or not at all, if I’ve learned my lesson. Slow ‘n’ steady wins the race, right?
Permalink | 2 CommentsEvery once in a while, I try out some new (or not-so-new) piece of technology just because it sounds really cool. Most of the time, it doesn’t quite work out the way I think it would.
And more often than not, I keep on using the new (or not-so-new) piece of technology, anyway. Because I’m an idiot sometimes. Admitting your problem is the first step to a cure, I’m told.
No one ever tells me what the second step is, of course. So I wind up stuck with a bunch of technojunk I don’t really like, but still use anyway. You’d think natural selection would have whisked me off to the ether by now, but no. Somehow I and my ‘idiot for complicated crap that doesn’t work very well’ gene manage to survive. Pray to god we never reproduce; future generations would be doomed to substandard food replicators and prototype transmitter beams that scatter your constituent atoms randomly throughout the Kuiper Belt instead of beaming you down to the fridge for another beer.
Because that’s what my hypothetical descendants would use a transmitter beam for, that’s why. What the hell else would you use it for? Solving mass transit problems forever? Instantaneous globetrotting? Interstellar exploration?
Sounds like awfully thirsty work to me. I’ll stick with my idea, thanks.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck trudging down my stupid late nineteenth-century stairs for a beer, and shooting myself in the foot with early twenty-first-century technology. Like the computer I’m currently typing on, and its cordless mouse.
“It’s not like I’ve always wished I could click on things from the other side of the room, or down the hall, or from across the state line in Maine, where people click on those sorts of links all the time, from what I hear.”
Look, I”ll come clean. I don’t know why I bought a cordless mouse in the first place. It’s not like I’ve always wished I could click on things from the other side of the room, or down the hall, or from across the state line in Maine, where people click on those sorts of links all the time, from what I hear.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, who doesn’t like a nice moose in fishnet stockings or a lacy teddy? It’s not ‘weird‘.
Well, not if you’re a moose. Nyah.)
The point is, when I’m using this computer, I’m right here, at the desk, using it. If the mouse has a cord, or a tether, or one of those unbreakable pen chains from the bank, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere with it. And the keyboard’s not wireless, so how far would I get, anyway? A foot and a half? Oh, fancy day! I can mouse from the middle of the floor now, instead of sitting at the desk. What wondrous times in which we live!
So why did I buy a cordless mouse? Because it sounded cool. And because I’m an idiot. Not in that order — and not in equal proportion. If you weighed them against each other on a scale, my ‘an idiot’ would clang the table and send ‘sounded cool’ flying like a bag of goose feathers. No contest.
Still, the mouse was fine. It worked like any other old mouse, corded or not, and I was okay with that. Sure, I paid a little extra for the ‘free range’ capabilities that I never used — none of that driving down the street while mousing, or surfing the web at home while riding an Appaloosa through the SIberian steppe — but that was no huge deal, so long as it worked. Which it did.
For about three weeks.
That’s when I began to notice the pointer acting a little ‘sluggish’. I thought maybe it was just me. I’ve had entire weeks where I seem to move a few percent slower than the rest of the world. Who’s to say my mouse hand doesn’t suffer from the same affliction?
But the problem gradually got worse. Sometimes, the cursor wouldn’t move at all, or a click wouldn’t register. Finally, the mouse just stopped performing altogether, and the cursor sat motionless on the screen, refusing to budge. It was like having a little labor negotiation on my very own desktop. I thought maybe the mouse and cursor had formed a union together, and were staging a walkout to protest working conditions. Or to get me to stop clicking on those links that the perverts in Maine keep sending me. I fully expected to see ‘list_of_demands.txt’ show up on the desktop — but how in the hell would I open it? Alt-Shift-Control-ScrewThisI’llJustBuyANewComputer?
Just as I was pricing cashmere mouse pads and Googling — on my laptop, of course — to find out how many weeks of vacation is standard for a cursor these days, my wife swooped in and diagnosed the problem. She smiled sweetly and said, ‘You think the battery’s dead?‘
Well… no. No, I didn’t think anything at all. I’m the idiot, remember?
So I opened up the mouse, fished out a couple of spent Duracells and replaced the batteries. Immediately, the mouse and cursor were in sync and working together again. Strike averted! And I didn’t even have to cave on the worker’s comp package. I knew I put the missus on the payroll as a management consultant for a reason.
And things were fine, again. For another three weeks, when the next set of batteries crapped out. And then the next. And the next. And several more sets, until tonight, when I sat down to write this post, gripped the mouse to click the bookmark, and the cursor mooooooooooooseyed across the screen in the general direction I was indicating, and ground to a halt an inch or two short of the mark. Seems my three weeks are up again already. Jeez, it seems like it was just Christmastime when… oh, that’s right. It was Christmastime when I switched those last ones out. Out. Standing.
I did manage to coax the stupid thing to finally stretch the cursor over to my link. And, after letting it sit in ‘cooldown mode’ for a few minutes, got far enough to open this page and highlight the post area in which to write. But will I actually find a way to submit it, without hooking it up to a car battery or charging the defibrillator paddles between clicks? At this point, I have no clue. Every twenty-one days or so, it becomes a total crapshoot. Maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t. Maybe it dies completely tonight, or maybe it lags and stutters just enough to make me want to chuck it down the garbage disposal. Maybe it actually behaves for the ten minutes I need, or maybe it paints handmade signs and parades around the status bar with the cursor, chanting, ‘To hell with this joint; we won’t point!‘
God, I hate that stupid mouse.
So why do I still use it? Because it’s cordless. And that’s cool. Also, that transmitter beam hasn’t been invented yet, and my old Bronze Age corded ghetto mouse is all the way in the other room down the hall. Who’s getting up for that? Not me. Not while there might still be a hard-fought click or two I can squeeze out of this damned thing, and that link to MooseInGarters.com right there in my inbox. I may be an idiot, but I’m not stupid.
Permalink | 3 CommentsI find it interesting how my tolerance for bullshit changes, depending on the situation. And on who’s doing the bullshitting in question.
At work, I’m a big fan of the ‘everybody gets one‘ policy. You can screw up big once, or make a ridiculous and possibly physically impossible request once, or fail to laugh at a particularly clever zinger snuck into a PowerPoint presentation at group meeting once.
“Unadulterated ass-kissing is always an option.”
More than that, and you’re on the shit list. Theoretically, you can worm your way back off the shit list with a string of unbridled competence and a sunny attitude and reasonable demands. Or extravagant gifts; let’s not forget the extravagant gifts. Unadulterated ass-kissing is always an option.
But it never happens that way. In my experience, ninety percent of people never use their ‘one’. And of the handful who have, most are up to, oh, twelve or nineteen or six thousand two hundred and four by now. There are takers and givers in the world, and in the world of corporate bullshitters, the givers keep on giving.
With family, it’s different. There, it’s three strikes and you’re… well, not ‘out‘, I suppose. Getting someone actually ‘out’ would involve a court order or divorce or something. And you’d have to scribble them out of family portraits, maybe even redraw the family crest. So ‘out’ isn’t really an option.
But if Uncle Larry calls me ‘Chuckles’ four effing times in one year, I am not obligated to visit him at the nursing home. And I’m not helping him cram those tennis balls on his walker again, either. That old jackass never gave my nose back when he took it thirty years ago, so he’s one strike in the hole already.
Friends get a little more leeway in my book. Hell, I’m the one who chose to spend time with them. Or more accurately, it’s some sort of mutually understood unspoken arrangement that no two people with penises attached are ever going to discuss the details of. Maybe chick friends talk about the ins and outs and terms and boundaries of their friendly relations. Not us guys. For us, if the conversation isn’t about some kickass show on TV last night or the merits of a 3-4 defense, then we should just be drinking our beer and sitting in silence.
So we spend an awful lot of time drinking beer, and sitting in silence. Or watching kickass shows on TV. Many of which are football games, often featuring a 3-4 defense.
(See, ladies? You can have it all in life. You just have to know which things to want, and be in the right bar and tuned to the right channel when they happen. It’s not rocket Buddhism.)
Once somebody gets the ‘friend’ tag, it usually takes quite a bit to rip it back off and give them the boot. If ‘everybody gets one’, then the everybodies you’re closest to get, what? Five? Nine? A couple of dozen?
In my circles, I can’t recall it ever coming to that. Sure, people will occasionally no-show or hog all the chips or say something scandalous about your favorite team — but it’s not all that common, and usually we’ll just go back to drinking beer or arguing about whether zone defense in the NBA is a stupid idea. Sometimes both. Clearly, the bullshit tolerance among chums is extremely high.
Especially since none of us knows the first damned thing about playing zone defense in the NBA. Hell, a couple of us can barely spell NBA. Sometimes, bullshit can be a really cool hand.
That brings us to the pinnacle of bullshit tolerance — the marriage. When it comes to wedded bliss, I firmly believe you should get several hundred opportunities for bullshit. Maybe thousands. Or whatever I’m up to so far, plus however many I might use up in the next forty years or more. Also, double that. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be a pain in the ass as an old man, so my incidence of bullshit will probably go through the roof. And I’ve got some of the same genes as Uncle Larry, so it’s not going to be pretty.
Lucky for me, my wife’s bullshit tolerance policy seems — so far — to fall in line with my own. Maybe one of these days, she’ll use up her first one, and I’ll get to catch up a little. Or maybe she’ll lock me in the basement for a few months for a little ‘bullshit cooling off’ period, to let the score reset. Or just maybe, when it comes to marriage, her Bullshit-O-Meter setting is like mine at work, with one crucial amendment:
‘Everybody gets one… more.’
I should probably get a clarification on that. Preferably before I get old and crotchety-er. That basement gets awfully cold at night.
Permalink | No CommentsI have a confession to make. I can’t remember for the life of me what this blog is for.
Originally, I mean. When I first sat down at my computer, dreamed up a name, and put fingertips to keyboard, I have no earthly idea what I was trying to accomplish. I’ve had goals for the site since then, sure — good ones, bad ones, unrealized and embarrassing ones — but on day one, what I had in mind is mostly lost to the ether.
(I say mostly because the very first post, from way back in June 2003, does provide a bit of introduction and rationale for the effort. But mostly, it explains why the first two names I thought of for the blog couldn’t be used. And pokes fun of John Lithgow. And vegans. And iMacs. Also, the phrase ‘a wet moose dipped in expired duck sauce’ appears within.
“It’s comforting to know that I’ve at least been consistent at showing my ass from the very beginning.”
It’s comforting to know that I’ve at least been consistent at showing my ass from the very beginning. A little depressing, perhaps, that I’ve been waving it in the internet’s face for four and a half years now, like some kind of Guinness Record Book marathon mooning attempt. But comforting, in its own way.
Still, that leaves little to remind me why I felt compelled to set up shop in the first place, other than to entertain. Hopefully, a bit of that has happened along the way somewhere.
And hopefully, the thought of me waving my ass for four and a half years back there didn’t just make you hork up any entertainment you might have previously enjoyed. Or your lunch. It’s probably best to stop by on an empty stomach, and with no other recently consumed entertainment in your system. Just to be safe.
At any rate, I’ve used the site for several humor-related (or attempted humor-related, which carries a slightly shorter sentence, if caught) purposes over the years, but my usual answer for what the site is actually for has been:
‘That’s where I write stuff, and then see if I can work it into my standup routine somehow.‘
The thing is, it’s really not especially true.
For one thing, I started the site in June of ’03, and didn’t actually go onstage until months later. The vast majority of what I wrote in the interval wasn’t meant for standup use, and frankly, there’s little way I could have used most of it from its printed form. For one thing, I’d have to talk someone into giving me seventy-three minutes of stage time, because these bastard posts are long. I might as well just take a laptop out to Boston Common and start reading; peoples’ looks wouldn’t be any stranger, and at least I’d save on an hour’s rent on a comedy room.
Also, it’s probably worth pointing out that I haven’t performed onstage since late 2005. I’m still comfortable calling myself an ‘aspiring standup comedian’ because A) I never really got all that far in ‘the business’ in the two years and ninety or so shows I did, and 2) I think I might like to go back onstage someday. Just not today. And probably not tomorrow. I’ll get back to you next week, and see how I feel about it. Maybe next month.
Meanwhile, I write, but it’s now obviously a separate exercise than the in-club, live-action, mostly-open-mic sort of thing I tried in the past. So separate, in fact, that I’ll occasionally be talking to someone, or get a comment from a reader, who says:
‘Hey, you should really try doing standup.‘
Note that these are not people who actually saw me do standup, or apparently know that I performed in the past. These are people who, in a relative vacuum, are led to believe that me doing standup sounds like a really generally okay idea, in the grand scheme of things.
Also note that these people are not my wife or friends or family members who actually did see me do standup. Those people are largely mum on the subject. Except for the occasional nervous cough or involuntary gag when I bring it up. Nice.
So consider this post both a tidbit of information that you might not have had — i.e., that I used to perform, mostly amateurly and seven minutes at a time, before tiny audiences throughout the Boston area — and an opportunity, should you find your interest piqued, to join that group of folks who now roll their eyes and choke on their tongues when they reminisce about watching my live shows.
Because I have videos.
Actually, I’ve had the videos for years, and a link over on the sidebar to the ‘Standup Stories‘ page recounting my experiences. But most of the video links on the individual show pages haven’t worked for a while, since I ran over my space quote on the host server. A while back, I took a few select clips, uploaded them to YouTube, and linked them back in to the proper places.
Then I got bored. So I never went back and removed the other links, or uploaded more videos, or gave it much thought for a few months. But now, just in case anyone out there might be starting to form an inkling of the thought, ‘Hey, maybe you should do standup‘, I can pretty well nip that in the bud with these links to the shows with working YouTube clips:
September 6, 2004 (The Comedy Connection, Boston, MA)
December 11, 2004 (The Emerald Isle, Dorchester, MA)
(All of the following shows were performed at The Comedy Studio in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. It’s my favorite room for standup in Boston, and a real treat to play or watch there when the room is packed and the crowd is having a blast. Good hosts and a few scorpion bowls don’t hurt, either.)
If you were to watch all of those clips… well, that’d be a little over an hour of your life that you’d never have back. But you’d also see examples of most of the types of shows I experienced as a comedian onstage — some great crowds, some small crowds, new material not working, old and tested material not working, some big laughs, some crickets, and usually, a hell of a lot of fun.
You’d also see a lot of the same material in a half dozen of the clips, and you’d get a really disturbing glimpse into the really, really striped rugby-heavy wardrobe I sport. I’m wearing the exact same shirt in five of those clips.
(Yes, I still own it. And yes, I wore it last week. The fashion hound is not me.)
Anyway, at least now if I ever talk about getting back onstage again, you’ll have something to cough and sputter about. So we’ll be even on that front. Peachy.
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