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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I’m writing this entry at the halftime of the Syracuse-Alabama ‘Sweet Sixteen’ NCAA basketball game. For those of you just tuning in, I’m a ginormous Orangemen fan, and have been for more than fifteen years.
(No, I didn’t go there. And no, I’ve never lived near there. I’ve never even been to the Carrier Dome. I know, I know — it doesn’t make any damned sense. Look, just read my explanation, and cut me some slack, all right? I don’t know what else to tell you.)
Anyway, what I can tell you is that I’m a big a fan of my ‘adopted’ school’s teams as any alumnus of any other institution of higher partying. Er, learning. I meant ‘learning‘. Sorry, Freudian shot. Uh, slip. Of course. Moving on.
The point is that I live and die with my team — every game, every shot, every last-minute heroic effort to decide a national champion.
(In ’87, it was Keith ‘Booger Face’ Smart with a shot from the corner to beat the ‘cuse; last year, it was Hakim Warrick’s block with time running out to save the game. That’s how it goes in college hoops — sometimes you win, and sometimes you vilify some cross-eyed lucky bastard and his sorry-ass, corn-fed, dickhead-coached team for the rest of your life. Um, that is to say — sometimes you lose.. I tend to get a little worked up over these things. Sorry.)
Anyway, watching a Syracuse game is like a religious experience for me. My palms sweat, and my heart pounds against my ribs. I curse, and scream, and squeal with joy. I get knots in the pit of my stomach; sometimes, I’m so animated and loud that I frighten the dog away. And if it doesn’t go my way, I feel the frustration and shame for hours, sometimes days.
Wait, did I say ‘religious experience’? Sorry, I meant, ‘sexual experience‘. My bad. All the rest of that probably makes much more sense now, eh?
Okay, enough silliness for now. Halftime’s just about over, and my hands are getting shaky again. Time to go through another twenty minutes of hell. I just hope they manage to pull this one out. I just hate being all pissy and snarly going into a weekend. Go ‘Cuse!
Permalink | No CommentsI was talking to a co-worker this morning — a reserved, straight-laced, no-nonsense co-worker — about a project that we’re having trouble getting off the ground. And near the end of the conversation, she looked me straight in the eye, and said this to me, without a hint of irony or miscief:
‘Well, we’d better just stop pussyfooting around and do it, then.‘
Now, how the hell is a guy like me supposed to respond to that? I honestly don’t know, and so I didn’t, at first. I ran through the first few reactions that came to mind, like Ahhnold in Terminator:
Somehow, none of these seemed appropriate. Meanwhile, she patiently stood there, waiting for a response. No doubt she was intrigued by the various emotions that flickered across my face as I considered the options above.
(‘Intrigued’, ‘disgusted’, ‘enhornied’… whatever. Eight of one, half dozen of the other, right?)
Anyway, I finally managed a weak nod and got the hell out of there. And then locked myself in my office and had a nice little giggle. That was a close one, folks. Sometimes, it’s hard being the office smartass, you know?
(Heh. I said, ‘hard‘. Ah, good times. Good times.)
Permalink | 3 CommentsLook. I’m begging you. Please, for the love of all that is fizzy and potable, listen to my pleas, soft drink vending machine operators. Heed my words, and rescue me from this nightmarish torture that your diabolical machines hath wrought.
My anguish is twofold. Observe, o masters of the vending machines, and right the pair of wrongs that torment my thirsty, decaffeinated soul. Gather ’round, and hear the tales of woe I weave:
First, I have to ask — what the hell has happened to the ‘SOLD OUT’ indicators associated with each button on your machines? Look, it’s not difficult, dammit. We had this shit in the seventies, when the bottles were made of glass, and the machines were run by hamsters in wheels and held together with duct tape and bubble gum. This is not fricking rocket science.
I’ve noticed an alarming trend over the years, and finally, you bastards have gone too far. See, back in the day, the actual buttons that were pressed to deliver the drinks were small, and the indicators for each were relatively large. Smallll. Larrrrge. It wasn’t the best system, I suppose — a slight slip of the thumb, and you’d be facing down a fart-flavored Fresca, instead of the Pepsi or Coke you were looking for. Still, if a slot was sold out, you’d know about it miles before you reached the machine. You could strip down to your undies and tan yourself in the fierce and fiery glow of the ‘old-skool’ ‘SOLD OUT’ indicators. Let the machine get low in two or three slots, and you’d need sunglasses and asbestos gloves to get near the damned thing.
For us, that system worked fine. It wasn’t perfect, and it took a steady hand, but you always knew where you stood with those vending contraptions. We had information, knowledge, options. But that wasn’t good enough for you vendy type of people, was it? Oh, no. Why, there were only five or six little pictures of the actual product on the machine — as the era of product placements and no-holds-barred Cola Wars geared up, the game was to maximize the eyeball-to-logo ratio. So, you embiggened the buttons. Fine. We all managed to get along, and buy our colas, for a couple of years. Ya-frickin’-hoo.
But oho! The buttons were still labeled with text. Dirty, complicated, need-some-schoolin’-to-decipher text. Outrageous! How could you expect the modern busy, dopey, lazy consumer to bother to actually read a word or two, when faced with a parched gullet? You can’t! Or at least, you didn’t.
(And we really appreciate the benefit of the doubt, there, skippy. Why don’t you haul your ass over here and change our diapers while you’re at it, you lousy condescending corporate marketing handjobs? I got a word you can read right here: ‘Suggit!‘)
So, you ballooned up the buttons again, this time large enough to hold a logo for the beverage of choice. Meanwhile, the real estate around those buttons got shrinkier and dinkier. The ‘SOLD OUT’ signs, once proud and obvious, were relegated to tiny little flickering orange numbers, pale and obtuse by comparison. On many machines, they were damned near unreadable; you had to stoop to bring the indicator to eye level to have any hope of deciphering whether the thing was on or off, and even then the pissant wattage those things gave off made it a crapshoot, at best. You’d think, in the golden age of LCD displays and neon artistry, that we’d have evolved a goddamned soft drink machine that would tell you, unequivocably, whether it was worth dealing with or not.
But no. No lovers of technology, you bag-munching venda-shits went the other direction. The new machines are the antithesis of the straightforward delivery systems of yore. Now, the machines are the fricking buttons — each selection is represented by an enormous, can’t-miss-it, bigger-than-life-sized, press-it-with-your-palm panel emblazoned with a picture of the bottle or can you’re looking for. From a usability standpoint, I’m sure it’s a triumph. A fetus could use the damned things, by simply banging it’s soft little head against whichever button it chooses, and grabbing the soda out of the tray.
(Of course, where an unborn child is gonna get a buck fifty or more to actually pay for it’s little slice of caffeinated heaven, nobody seems to know. Maybe it’s expected that the mother will pay for the soda, and the kid will just kick at the buttons through her belly until it gets what it wants. Hey, maybe that would work.
Just don’t ask how mommy’s gonna get that thing to her not-yet-cutie to drink, all right? I think I’ve gone just as far down this ridiculous road as I want to right now. This ain’t ‘Pregnant Penthouse Letters’, people. Let’s move on.)
So, the buttons are fine. Just so long as your definition of ‘fine’ encompasses the concepts of ‘garish’, ‘unnecessary’, ‘ostentatious’, and ‘overgrown’, that is. Still, the buttons aren’t the biggest problem here. No, the real travesty is that putting these fricking manhole covers that we’re supposed to push on the machines leaves no room for the ‘SOLD OUT’ indicators. Even the little ingrown penlight doohickeys are gone. Now there’s nothing. Nada. Zima. Er, zilch. Sorry, I meant ‘zilch’.
So there’s no way to know whether your particular cup of caffeinated poison is actually in the infernal device without plunking a half a roll of quarters in the damned thing and punching a button. How fucking ‘user friendly’ is that? ‘Have a Coke and a smile?‘ Sure. But what if the machine is out of Coke? How about you ‘have six quarters and my foot up your shiny metal ass‘?
All I’m saying is that it can’t possibly be so fricking hard to let me know that I’m wasting my time on the stupid machine before I waste said time. My father’s vending machine’s did it. My father’s father’s vending machines did it. Who in the Sam damned hell ruined my fricking vending machines?!
Which brings me to the second point of contention I have with these tallywhacking tincan teases. How’s about giving me a choice between using exact change, or overpaying for your product? Who could possibly lose in this scenario? This baffles me completely. See, a few minutes ago, I went in to get a Pepsi from the machine in our office. Miraculously, it wasn’t out of the juice this time. (Not that I could tell that up front, but I think I’ve pulverized that particular dead horse well enough for now. I’ll move on.)
However, all I had on me were two dollar bills. The machine takes a buck fifty. Fine. I fed the first dollar in, *shoop shoop shoop*. I fed the second dollar in, *shoop shoop shoop*. The little LCD screen showed ‘$2.00‘ credit to my name. Fantabulous. So, I pressed the billboard-masquerading-as-a-button for my Pepsi, and… nothing. Press. Press. Press. Leeeeean. Bupkis. So, I checked the display, vowing that if it said, ‘SOLD OUT‘ one more time, I would rip the assmunching machine’s refrigeration coils out and feed ’em down it’s frigging coin slot, one at a time. But lo, that was not the particular brand of seething frustration in store for me today. Nope, today, the little pixels spelled out:
‘EXACT CHANGE ONLY‘
Bitches. Ever-loving, over-carbonated, fizzy fricking bitches. Here I am with only two bills to my name, and this punk-ass machine won’t give me a soda because it’s too much?! I thought we were living in a dog-eat-dog, penny-pinching, orgaistic capitalist haven here. So where’s the fricking button that let’s me tell this overgrown toaster,
‘I don’t care. Right now, that extra fiddy cents is worth far less to me than the sweet, sweet sting of caffeine and sugar running through my veins. I can make it til five pm without these two bucks, but I will not make it to the end of the day if I don’t get my sweet, sweet, sugary soda to slurp on! NOW!!‘
Of course, no such button exists. And thereby, the thirsty consumer is bent over and screwed once again, without so much as a nice dinner or a ‘Gee, I like your hair today‘. Sure, we’re expected to pay two bucks — or more — if we want a nice little cola drinkie at the ball game, or a concert, or our favorite boobie bar. But actually choosing to pay the extra cash to get a soda when we’re really desperately in need of one? No. Sorry, can’t do that. No soup for us. Again, I say, ‘Bitches!!‘
So, there you have it, vending machine magnates. Somewhere back there — near the beginning, I suspect — it morphed from ‘impassioned plea’ to ‘potty-mouthed rant’, but I think you get the picture. I’m not convinced that you’ll actually do anything about these issues, but at least I’ve been heard. I suppose that’s enough, for now.
Well, that and the Pepsi I managed to get by trading the guy down the hall a dollar bill for two quarters. Hey, maybe you soft drink asstards don’t want to make a marked-up profit on my desperation for caffeine, but I can always find someone who will. Your loss, ya carbonated bozos. *thhhhpppppttttt*
Permalink | 7 CommentsI fear the universe may still be talking to me. At work today, some guy had on the same stripey shirt that I did. And it’s not a common stripey pattern, either — I’ve never seen it on anyone else, in fact. I’m pretty sure the universe is definitely trying to tell me something. Something verrrry important. And very probably about my lousy fashion sense. Bitches.
Anyway, in other news, there’s something I’ve been meaning to mention here for a while. It’s about the elevator at my office. There’s something a bit… unnerving about it. It’s reflective. You know, on the inside of the doors. Mirrored. And I don’t like it one damned bit.
Now, I know why it’s reflective — that’s obvious. You use reflective metal on the inside of your elevator when you want to prevent passenger nose-picking, and you can’t afford an elevator operator. Or a camera. Or a fake plastic camera.
(Or a fake plastic operator, for that matter. But who wants Pat Sajak in their elevator at work?
But that’s not important right now. I’m just name-dropping with the Sajak thing. The point is that the presence of mirrored surfaces tend to discourage certain dubious behaviors. Nose-picking is of course the most well-known of these undesirable habits, but there are several others, as well. It’s also nearly impossible to excavate your navel, diddle your privates, or take a whiz while you’re staring at an image of your own dirty, disgusting self.
Yeah, that’s right — almost. You heard me. So I go the extra mile to research what I write, okay? It’s not just ‘peeing in the elevator’; it’s called ‘journalism‘, you hear me?)
Anyway, I understand the reasons, and sure, the mirroryness of the elevator works in that regard. On me, anyway — I’m certainly not gonna stand there, watching myself pick my own nose, while I’m being lifted up to my cubicle. Me picking someone else’s nose, maybe. Some stranger yanking pinky boogies out of my schnozz? Absolutely. I’d probably take pictures of that, maybe even put ’em on my Christmas cards. But my own digit digging in my own Durante? Nah. Not cool.
So, the reflective doors are serving a purpose. That’s fine when I’m in there alone — I’m happy to make funny faces at myself for four floors’ worth of elevating. Of course, it’ll get me fired one day, when I mistime the doors opening, and my boss finds me waggling my tongue and stretching my eyelids over my ears as he’s stepping out for lunch.
(Hey, don’t laugh. My grandma walked in on me making faces in the mirror one day when I was a kid; she damned near swallowed her dentures. Seriously. She started sputtering and gurgling… we had to loosen her girdle three notches to settle her down. She’s a delicate flower, my grammy.)
Anyway, my real beef with those damned elevator doors comes when there are other people in there with me. They make it exceptionally hard to follow the first, most important, cardinal rule of elevator travel: no eye contact.
See, in most elevators, you can simply stare straight ahead, and you’re fine. Even if people are in front of you, all you’re gonna see is the backs of their heads, assuming they’re doing their job, too. But with mirrors ahead, you’re still in danger of making uncomfortable eye contact with the other passengers. There’s no good strategy — you can’t turn and face the back of the ‘vator. There might be people behind you; you could accidentally look at them. And you can’t face the side walls; you’ll look like an idiot, and you might miss your floor. The only acceptable strategy is to face front forward, but the mirrored doors make that a minefield. All those eyes, flitting back and forth, searching through the doors and back into the elevator — it’s just a matter of time before two sets of peepers lock onto each other and make everybody squeamish. Those damned doors have got to go, I tell you!
Anyway, that’s been on my mind for a while. I just thought I should let you in on it. So, you know, when you hear that I got fired for spreading mud on our elevator doors, or duct-taping them together, you’ll know what happened. I mean, I’ll try to be secretive about it, but I’m just about due to get caught doing something in there. I almost got walked in on picking my navel in there last week.
Hey, hey! Journalism, dammit. Journalism! How many times do I have to tell you people? Bitches!
Permalink | 9 CommentsI’m not particularly superstitious, nor religious in any meaningful way. I’ve dabbled, with mixed results, in a few ‘spiritual’ exercises, and have come away a fairly skeptical agnostic.
(Of course, maybe I didn’t dabble in the right areas. Most of my experience has been with trying to interpret a bunch of dubious stories written way too long ago to make any damned sense to me, or trying to sit quietly and concentrate on ‘nothing’ when all I could really think of is how my nose is itching like hell, and my undies are crawling up my ass. Frankly, I’m not so sure that the path to enlightenment is paved with burning bushes and sweaty wedgies. But that’s just me.
I suppose I was born at the wrong time to have any fun with spirituality. I’m a little too young for popping a handful of ‘shrooms, getting naked and nasty with another handful of my closest friends, passing around the bong, and calling it ‘religious, man’. On the other hand, I’m too old to go dropping hits of E and moshing under the strobe lights for three days and nights until I see ‘the face of God’. Is it any wonder my generation is so fucking bitter?)
Anyway, with all of that said, I do still sometimes think that the universe — or Universe, or God, or Nature, or Allah, or Zeus, or Pinky Tuscadero, if you want… whatever buoys your sloop, dude — is trying to get my attention. It’s always something subtle, like a particularly strong deja vu, or an uncanny coincidence — just a little cosmic tap on the shoulder to make sure I’m listening.
Listening for what, I’ve never quite been able to say. Maybe it’s just a test of the Enlightenment Broadcast System; in the event of real life-changing divine inspiration, the test message will be replaced with a blinding white light and a chorus of heavenly voices. Or maybe it’s telling me that I should run out and buy a lottery ticket, or try to be the nineteenth caller to win those free Blue Man Group tickets. How the hell should I know? If the universe is gonna be so fricking obtuse about it, then what’s the point in sending me an otherwordly IM in the first place?
I’ll give you an example — as you might have guessed, this whole business is on my mind because one of these little ‘pings’ just happened to me today. Here’s how it went down:
The office where I work is in a little complex of buildings. I was on my way back there after lunch, and had stopped in a little convenience store in one of the buildings for a Pepsi. I walked outside, thinking of little besides caffeine and the emails I needed to write, when suddenly the chorus of a song popped into my head. No warning, no trigger that I could remember — if some convoluted train of thought had led me there, it had long ago left the station, bound for parts unknown. All I was left with was the song — Goodbye to You, by Scandal.
Or, more accurately, ‘Scandal, featuring Patty Smyth’, as you may recall. I didn’t, of course, because I had to look the fricking thing up to remember whose song it was. Which is part of the point, really — as far as I know, I haven’t heard the song in ages. I never owned the CD, and couldn’t remember who sang it. I never listen to the radio any more — it’s all CDs and MP3s for me these days, so it’s unlikely that I even accidentally heard the song sometime. And it wasn’t one of my favorites, even back in the day when it was in ‘heavy rotation’ on MTV.
(And that tells you how long ago it came out — back then, MTV actually played videos. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it, kids?)
So, fine — random song comes bopping into my head. No biggie; my brain’s half mush to begin with. These things are going to happen from time to time. So I kept walking, right past the bar on the right, and the Thai restaurant, and around the corner of the coffeeshop that plays music on a speaker over the front door. It was in between songs when I rounded the corner, but a few steps later, there it was, a blast from the past: Goodbye to You.
I didn’t fully recognize it, at first. I got a couple of steps further, and stopped to listen. I just stood there in the courtyard, with my head tilted back, waiting for the first chorus, so I could be sure. And — see, this is where it gets really weird — while I stood there, a bit shaken and befuddled, two men came walking through the courtyard in my direction. They weren’t together; they were walking maybe eight or ten paces apart, and forking in different directions — the one in front was walking towards my left, maybe to the Thai place I’d passed. The other was strolling to my right, heading towards the restaurant across the courtyard. As far as I could tell, the men hadn’t even seen each other. And yet, there was something striking about the pair:
They looked exactly alike.
Their clothes were different, but their features were near-identical. Both were a bit older, probably in their fifties, with matching beards, bald heads, paunches, and wire-rimmed glasses. Think James Lipton, if he let himself go a little, and then multiply it by two. It was creepy, to say the least. And the spookiest part was, they had no idea — I looked from one, back to the other, and then back to the first again. The nearer one caught my eye, and gave me a strange look.
(And why not? I was standing in the courtyard, going nowhere in particular, flabbergasted by a Patty Smyth song from a half a lifetime ago playing in a coffeeshop behind me, and staring open-mouthed at him, and then away, and then back at him for no good reason that he could possibly know about. I must have looked like a Grade A boobjob at that point.)
But he never looked back to see his mirror image, and they soon disappeared — off on their own individual errands, perhaps never to come so close to meeting again. After a few seconds, I managed to shake my brain back into place, and went on my way, puzzled over the whole incident. What could it mean? Was it a warning of some kind? An alert? A notice, that I should immediately… what? Turn around and go home? Give away all my possessions and move into a cave? Switch to non-dairy milk? What, dammit? What?!
Eh. Screw it. If the universe is gonna beat around the proverbial burning bush that way, then to hell with it. I don’t have time to figure this shit out. I’m gonna take it to mean that I should go home early today, pick up a lottery ticket on the way, and soak in the bathtub with a bottle of tequila until it all makes sense. Or until I don’t care any more, and I think you and I both know which one’s coming first. I may not understand the message, but by Jove, I’ll eat the frigging worm. And if that doesn’t give me visions, then I’ll just wait for the next nudge from Mother Nature to try again. Maybe one of these times, the cryptic bitch will straighten up and make some damned sense.
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