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38

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#38. I am the pickiest beer snob I know.

so there are probably — only probably, mind you — bigger beer snobs out there. But I don’t know them, so if you find one, let me know. I’d like to know that I’m not the absolute pinnacle of high hops expectations.

So, just to let you know where I stand, I put beers in five categories:

1. Well-made Pale Ales and India Pale Ales (IPAs): Examples: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Magic Hat Blind Faith, North Coast’s Red Seal Ale
2. Really good Stouts and Porters: Examples: Guinness Draught, Geary’s Porter, Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout
3. Interesting beers that I haven’t tried yet Examples: Well, if I knew, I’d have tried them, now, wouldn’t I?
4. Local ‘in a pinch’ beers / oddball brews: Examples: Sam Adams Lager, Harpoon IPA, Rogue Dead Guy Ale, Xingu Black Beer
5. Undrinkable pisswater passed off as ‘beer’: Examples: Bud, Coors, MGD, Miller, Michelob, just about anything else

(Just as an aside, the absolute best beer in the world is an IPA, IMO. It’s the Victory Hop Devil IPA, and if you’re a fan of rich, complex, hoppy beers, you have to try it. Really. Right now. Stop reading this crap and go find yourself a bottle, or better yet, a case. It’s brewed in the Philly area and distibuted throughout the Northeast. If you live there, run — don’t walk! — out and get some today. If not, then fly — don’t drive! — to the East Coast and do the same. Your life is simply incomplete until you’ve done so. Don’t be a weiner.)

Now, beer snobbery — snobbery of any kind, really — is a relatively new phenomenon for me. For one thing, I’m not a picky eater. Throw it on my plate, and I’ll definitely try it, and probably like it. For another, I’m not allergic to any kinds of foods. So I’m not really used to being the person who makes a fuss in restaurants or bars. (And there’s always one, isn’t there?) Also, I wasn’t always a beer snob. I drank Old Milwaukee in college (hey, eight bucks a case, with a dollar back for returning the bottles — we couldn’t afford not to drink it), and chugged Rolling Rock for a few years afterward. So it’s not like I’m particular about what I put inside my body or anything.

That said, I just can’t bring myself to drink crappy swill any more. Life is too short, and a good beer is too tasty, to waste time on nasty, stinky near-beer substitutes. But it just feels weird to be so damned picky. I can only shop at certain liquor stores. I’m constantly suggesting brewpubs and places with huge beer selections for dinner, so I can get what I really want. If I ever lose my taste for Sam Adams — very big around Boston, of course — I’ll be shutting myself off from dozens of dives and sports bars that don’t serve anything else I can stomach. It’s really rather inconvenient!

It makes me wonder how some people can live their whole lives this way. I mean, I’m only picky about one thing. Really. Come over sometime — check out my wardrobe, and my messy desk, and my lack of complicated hair products. I’m really not a pick-pick-picky person. But some people are, and frankly, I don’t see where they get the time or the energy. How can you afford to live your life predicated on whether the salad dressing is on the side, or the steak is medium — not medium well, or medium rare, but exactly, perfectly medium — or every single strand of your hair is set into place, double-checked for position, and then frozen in its tracks with a gallon of aerosol glue? I mean, who has the time? Not me. It’s all I can do to keep track of where I can get a good brew. My life would frickin’ fall apart if I were that picky about everything. Please!

37

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#37. I’ve been the Chief Technical Officer of a company.

I know, I know; it’s hard to believe. Still, it’s true, and I still have some official business cards to prove it. I was once among the elite, the powerbrokers. A malingering moneymongering muckety-muck. A fat cat. I pressed the flesh, and networked, and wore power ties to power lunches. I ruled the world.

Okay, so it wasn’t really like that. At all. In actual fact, I was the CTO of a twelve-person medical software services company, and wore my shorts and T-shirts (or jeans and rugbys, when I needed to look nice) to a tiny office smaller than the apartment I lived in at the time. I walked to work, ate lunch at my desk — or at the local KFC — and spoke to maybe four people a day. Usually via Instant Messenger. Even though they were sitting approximately twelve feet from me. Such was my life as a CTO.

Eventually, I even changed my own title (hell, I got to make up the first one; why not do it again?) to ‘Lead Systems Architect’, which was closer to what I wanted to do when I grew up. And still is, in fact. (If I ever grow up, I’ll tell you whether I was right about that particular choice.) But I kept the ‘Founding Partner’ part of my title, because it was still true.

So how was I as a CTO? Well, to be honest, I didn’t care much for the ‘business side’ of running a, er, business. If you know what I’m saying. Sure, everything you do in a business is part of ‘the business’. What I mean is, I was much more interested in talking tech specs with clients and testing technology and building systems and coding than in things like managing the books, or setting a budget, or negotiating deals. Or wearing a suit for any length of time, so that eliminated me from quite a lot of the activities that I didn’t care much for, anyway.

So in the end, I handled a lot of the software design and development and in-project client relations, while two of the other founders handled most of the business-related tomfoolery. (Our fourth founder was a bit like me, in that he wanted to stay away from suits, and people in suits, as much as possible, but he was more interested in the medicine than the bits and bytes.) Anyway, the division of labor worked out okay, in my estimation — we were able to function as a software services company for two years without one red cent of venture capital money. On the other hand, the other founders did sink a bit of cash themselves into the business from time to time, and we got paid only when we could afford the luxury, but still, I think we did a pretty fair job.

I left the company to move to Boston around the time that they got sick of being poor and decided to morph the company into a true blue product company. Meaning that they’d fish for VC money to build an honest-to-goodness off-the-shelf product, and sell it for gobs of cash. So how’d that work out? Well, they lasted for about four years, and even got a couple of model systems installed in local hospitals. By all accounts, they were making very good progress.

But VCs are nasty bitches, and the first couple of million dollars in debt repayment came due a couple of months ago. The folks that were left — up to twenty or more at one point, but back to a skeleton crew of just a handful by this spring — had no shot at coming up with that kind of cash, and so there was nothing they could do. The Vulture Capitalists swooped in, took hold of the intellectual capital, sold off all the assets, and shut the doors. Which is their job, I suppose. I don’t really fault them. If someone owed me two million dollars that I’d loaned them four years ago, I think I’d get a medieval on their ass, as well.

Anyway, that seems to be the end of that. I was really hoping they’d make it big, after all. And not because I feel like I had a hand in starting it all, mind you, or that I wanted to be able to say I was once the CTO of a now multi-million dollar cash cow. No. I’m not as egotistical as all that. No, I genuinely wanted them to succeed, because they’re good people — the few left that I know, anyway — and I had some good times there, and I’d like to see them happy.

Okay, okay, just a smidgen might also be because I owned over half a million shares in the company, and if they had ever managed to get the stock listed on a market somewhere, I was going to be insanely, filthy rich. That might be just a bit of why I was rooting for them. But only a bit. Really. I’m sure of it.

36

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#36. I’ve been skydiving. Twice!

You should go. Trust me on this one. I’m scared of heights, and I went. At least, I was scared of heights. Once you’ve stared down at the world at three thousand feet from a moving plane, though, your perspective changes just a tad. Looking down from an extension ladder or riding one of those glass elevators just doesn’t seem so bad, anymore. Funny how having the shit scared out of you can give you a whole new perspective.

My wife went too, though only once, if I remember correctly. I think she would have gone again, though — don’t believe that it scarred her for life or anything. I think she came the second time, after I told her how goddamned cool it was. She’s a trooper. (And now, she’s a paratrooper! Yay! Fun with words!)

So, anyway, just so you don’t think that we took the wussy way out, I’ll give you a short description of our jump experience. These were not tandem jumps, with an experienced instructor riding on your ass all the way down. No. Neither were these simple ‘boot your ass out the door’ jobs, where you get a chute pack and a shove and you really don’t have to do anything. No, our experience was a bit more harrowing than all of that, so I think it deserves a mention.

For both jumps, I had to go through a training class, where I learned (and later, re-learned) all about the equipment, and the proper form, and the emergency procedures. (The latter of which were very simple: 1. Deploy chute. 2. In case of failure, deploy backup chute. 3. In case of backup failure, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. 4. Optionally, wail and shriek like a horror movie bimbo as you plummet to a painless, but rather messy, death.) The class took about two hours or so, and then they fitted us for jumpsuits, helmets, boots, and chute packs. Then a bit more waiting until it was my group’s turn, and they herded us into the plane.

I don’t know whether any of you have been skydiving before. Maybe when you think of it, you imagine an aircraft from an old war movie, or maybe you younger folks picture the planes that they use to transport the X Games sky surfers. Well, neither of those quite matches what we got. Our plane was an old, beat-up Cessna, with most of the equipment removed. The pilot and an instructor took the two seats up front, while three of us sat on our knees in the back for the bumpy ride up to diving altitude. It wasn’t ‘comfy’, we couldn’t stand straight up, and we couldn’t hear a damned thing for all the engine noise. (Did I mention how frickin’ cool it was?)

Okay, so when it got to be my turn, I shimmied into position by the door and did what they’d taught us in class, which was this: First, I stood up, as best I could, and grabbed onto each side of the gaping-open door. I got my first glimpse of the ground at this point, which drove my jackhammer-pounding heart down past my stomach. Near my pancreas somewhere, I think. Or possibly near my bladder, because all that thumping made me have to pee.

Anyway, as I was taught, I then took my right foot, and stepped — yes, stepped — onto the small patch of linoleum pasted on top of the wheel of the plane. I grabbed onto the wing — again, as I was told to do — and lurched my left foot out as well. I was now standing on the wheel of the plane, behind the right wing, and reaching over the wing to grip the front edge. Seems bad enough, doesn’t it? Scared yet? Don’t worry, it gets worse.

So, the procedure at that point involved a bit of courage. Yeah, the shit so far was easy, at least by comparison. The next step was to scootch my hands outward along the wing, away from the plane. If you have even a reasonably accurate picture of the setup here, then you can’t help but wonder how the hell one would be able to remain standing on the wheel at this point. Well, one wouldn’t. And neither did I. But that’s okay, because I wasn’t supposed to. I was supposed to, and did, let my feet lift off the ‘ground’, such as it was, and flutter like a paper streamer from the plane while I hand-scooted halfway to the end of the wing. That was the hard part. (But oh so cool. You have no idea.)

After that, it was all downhill. (Heh. Little chute humor for you there.) Once at the ‘launching spot’, I just looked up (which helps to arch your back properly), let go, and I was off. We beginners were doing ‘static line’ jumps, which meant that my ripcord was attached to the plane. I had maybe a second of freefall, whooshing away from the Cessna, and then the cord yanked me upright, and my chute out. I got to practice turning and spinning and maneuvering all the way down, and made a stumbly, though painless, landing. Both times, in fact. Maybe the third time’s a charm in that department.

All in all, skydiving’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, and I’d love to try it again. I had dreams at the time of going back until I could graduate to ‘real’ jumps, higher and higher up. And then without the static line, and finally with a certificate that would let me jump anywhere that offered the service. But I was a poor graduate student at the time, as was my wife, so we had little time and less money to pursue an extreme sport such as this. Still, we had a blast when we went. You should try it, really. Afraid of heights? This’ll cure what ails you. You say you’re not afraid of heights? Not afraid, hmm? You will be, young Jedi. You. Will. Be.

35

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#35. I once road-tripped from Richmond, VA to Hilton Head, SC, overnight.

Of course, the worst part was that I’d made the same trip, in reverse, that same morning. Not cool.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t drive the whole way. But there were only two of us, so it was no picnic in the park, either. Here’s how it came to pass:

Six of us high school chums celebrated graduation by driving down to Hilton Head in our friend’s Chevy Suburban. If you haven’t seen a Suburban, it’s big. Huge. Imagine three Buicks crammed together. And that would be the trunk. Really, it’s fucking enormous.

So we had a fairly comfortable ride down. It was a twelve or fourteen hour drive, if I recall, but we took it in shifts, and got there on Saturday night with no incident. We were staying at a condo time-shared by the car owner’s father. So, really, we were kind of milking this guy. I mean, we were good friends with him — don’t get me wrong, we hung out with him quite a bit — but it started feeling to me as though he was the only one contributing to the trip. The car, the condo, and most or all of the gas. He was too nice to say it, but without him, we’d have never been able to go. Of course, he was the only rich kid in our group, so maybe he was cool with that. He was cool with pretty much everything; maybe I was the only one who noticed.

Anyway, a couple of hours into the trip, he sprung a surprise on us. His friend was graduating from high school in Richmond that week, and the ceremony was scheduled for Sunday evening. This is a girl that he’d visited many times — his grandma lived in Richmond — and he really wanted to see her. And what’s more, he needed someone to go with him. Like, oh, maybe the guy who felt like we all owed him a big favor and were semi-freeloading off his wealth and good graces? Somebody like that?

Why, yes, somebody exactly like that. So, I volunteered. How far could it be, anyway? We’d zip over there in a couple of hours, press the flesh and shoot the shit for a while, and be back in the hot tub by midnight. No problem.

Did I mention that I never did all that well in Geography class in high school?

So, as we turn in that first night at the condo (sometime in the wee hours, I might add), my friend asked me what time I wanted to get up in the morning. I said, ‘Eleven or so‘. He laughed. I asked why. He said that we’d have to be well gone by eleven o’clock to make the ceremony. I paused. ‘Isn’t the ceremony in the evening?‘ He replied that it was. I was starting to see what I’d gotten myself into. ‘So exactly how long does it take to get there?‘ I shut my eyes tight, hoping for good news. ‘About nine hours,’ came the reply. My eyes popped open on their own. Nine? Ni-ine? Shit. I was not a happy man.

But my ignorance of the distance between the Atlantic Ocean and central Virginia was not my friend’s fault, and so I kept my promise. We arose, early but none too bright, and set off from the beach we’d worked so hard to reach, and toward Richmond. At eight o’clock in the morning, or some ridiculous shit like that. Unbelievable.

Still, I tried to make the best of it. I did manage to get him into one of the bands I liked, and they were perfect for driving. The Screaming Blue Messiahs were funny, irreverent, catchy, and — most important — rocked at a mile a minute on just about every song. You name it — ‘I Wanna Be a Flintstone‘, ‘President Kennedy’s Mile‘, ‘Twin Cadillac Valentine‘, ‘Jesus Chrysler Drives a Dodge‘, and ‘55 – The Law‘. It was all good.

So we turned ’em up and took off down the highway. I think we switched once halfway, so he could navigate around the city, but all in all, the nine hours went pretty quickly, and we hit Richmond at six o’clock or so. The ceremony was at seven, so we drove to his grandmother’s house. We freshened up there, but politely declined her offer of dinner. I think we were still stuffed with drive-through burgers and fries at that point. But we did drop our overnight bags off, and soon enough headed off to the high school stadium.

It was an outdoor ceremony, which is pretty ballsy, if you ask me. One quick summer shower, and the memory is ruined for all involved. But on this occasion, the gods were smiling, and the event went off without a hitch. Well, for the seniors, perhaps. But there was much hitchiness in my mind, friends, and I was fretting and fuming the whole time.

I don’t know how many graduation ceremonies you’ve attended in your life, but I can tell you from my experience that they’re exceptionally boring. The only real blip in the monotony is when the person(s) you know actually walk across the stage, which is what? Four seconds out of two or three hours? Or in this case, zero seconds — since I didn’t know anyone there — out of three and a half hours (since this was the graduating senior class from Hell attending God Damn This Is A Big Fucking School High School). Maybe you can get an idea of my mood. Dark, and tortured, and not happy with the way this was turning out.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t mean to anyone, or even impolite. These people weren’t the problem, and they were all nice enough, and happy to welcome us into the group. But I was on vacation, dammit! I was seventeen years old, and I managed to score a week at the week sans parents, or adult supervision of any kind. The last thing I wanted to do was spend two days of it there, not on a beach, with no bikini girls, and with nothing but parents all over the place. Even if they were other people’s, and I’d never see them again. It just isn’t right.

So, at some point, I got the idea to go back. That same night. I don’t remember exactly when I talked it over with my friend, but he wasn’t buying. Not at first, anyway. I had to slowly, gradually work on him throughout the night. We talked about it at the ceremony. The people he knew told us we should stay in town that night. I was not to be deterred.

We talked about it at the post-ceremony parties that we were graciously invited to. Friends and strangers there told us we should stay in town that night. I would not be denied.

We talked about it back at his grandmother’s house, where we were either going to hit the sack or hit the road. She told us we should stay in town that night. I wasn’t really listening. Frankly, I don’t know how the hell she let us leave. It was twelve thirty in the morning at that point. But she did.

We made a pit stop just outside of town, where we officially started the clock on the trip back. It was ten minutes till one. We gassed up the Suburban, and stocked up on ‘stay awake’ food, which consisted of Jolt cola, Pepsi, Ho-Ho’s, and sour cream and onion potato chips. I took the first shift. It seemed only fitting.

I can’t tell you how many times we switched during the night. All I can tell you is that I drove at least twice. When I was driving, I kept my window wide open and the Messiahs blasting just as fucking loud as they would go. Meanwhile, my buddy was on the floor between the second and third rows of seats, sleeping like a baby. And when he was driving, I was doing the same.

On one shift change, I pulled onto an off-ramp to make the switch, and drove downhill into a milky-thick fog bank. It took me a couple of minutes to get to a spot where I could see the damned ground under the car. With no cars or buildings around, the area looked like a moor, or a Louisiana swamp. I almost wondered whether I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, and meandered south instead of east. I shook myself wide awake and looked around in wonder. Then I woke up my friend, and gave him his turn at the wheel. I was asleep before he started the car.

And lo and behold, we made it. At ten am, the scraggliest, groggiest, sour-cream-and-onion-Ho-Ho-smellingest two teenaged kids you’d ever want to see (or smell) came rolling back into the condo parking lot. The other guys were already up; my friend and I collapsed into the Jacuzzi and explained what we were doing back so early. Nobody was all that impressed; we were seventeen, and there was cootchie out there on the beach. They left; we slept.

But we did not miss our second day at the beach, and that’s all I wanted. Sure, we drove through part of it, and slept through some more, but dammit, we slept at the beach. And in a Jacuzzi, no less. That beats the shit out of anything we were gonna do in Richmond. No, really, believe me — this guy was not gonna get laid that night. He wasn’t that type of guy, for one thing. And for another, if there was any possibility of a little ugly bumpin’ goin’ down, I’d have stayed right there and taken one for the team. But if I had, he’d have damn well better ponied up a friend for me, too. At least for a little lip-lockin’. I got no problem playing wingman for a night, dude, but if I have to do it nine frickin’ hours away from the beach I just left, there’d better be some damned action!

34

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#34. I’m a pretty good juggler.

Actually, I’m not bad at all, as long as I stick to three balls. (And who among us wouldn’t stick to three balls, if given the chance, eh?)

Anyway, I can also juggle two balls in each hand (let it go, people, let it go…), but not at the same time. It’s amazing how you’re often able to do two things, but not at once, isn’t it? Like ‘sneeze’ and ‘stare’, or ‘poop’ and ‘not squint’, or — for most folks — ‘vote’ and ‘think’. And for me, ‘juggle over here’ and ‘juggle over there’. I just can’t get it right.

But I can do some tricks with three balls. (Then again, couldn’t we all, right? I hate to encourage the perverts among you, but this is good stuff, isn’t it?) Anyway, I can do a cascade, a shower (one direction, anyway), and a reversed cascade. I can also juggle off a wall, (sometimes) throw a ball from behind my back, and — on a good day — approximate a decent shuffle. Plus a few other assorted little tricklets and gimmicks.

I other words, I’m just nearly good enough to put on clown makeup and entertain a gaggle of snotty brat-monsters. Ugh. So I keep my juggling fairly private. The one place where I do like to juggle a bit is at work, though. I fid that when I’m working on some particularly thorny problem, throwing a few balls around helps to relax me, and get me back on track. Of course, so does throwing a few beers around, but I can’t very well do that before noon, now, can I?

Anyway, I’d like to get better, and maybe someday juggle four balls, or learn how to do bowling pins. (Plus, there’s far less snickering if you juggle pins instead of balls. Really.) I’ve practiced a bit with plastic rings, and can manage them okay, but they’re a pain in the ass to work with, because they go rolling off all over the frickin’ room when you miss one. I tried coating them with tape, or glue, so they wouldn’t go so far, but — as I see in hindsight — that wasn’t my best idea ever. All I got was more frustration and some sticky fingers. And if I’d wanted that, I’d have stuck to juggling balls.

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. (Tee hee!)