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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I don’t know about you, but I spend an awfully large percentage of my life being late. Late for work, late to meetings, late getting home, late going to bed… I’m always somewhere I’m not still supposed to be, or rushing like hell to get to the next destination. It’s been that way my whole life — I was always late for class in college (when I bothered to go… damned eight o’clock classes), tardy in high school, and rolled in after the last bell in elementary school. Hell, I was even born late.
(And after thirty-odd hours of labor, which my mother will never let me forget. Hey, did she ever stop to think that maybe I was busy in there? Maybe I was doing something important, dammit. I can’t be bothered every damned time some woman dilates, fer chrissakes… what about my needs?)
Anyway, after a while, you can get used to anything. So I’ve come to recognize my various modes and moods that crop up when I’m late, and I’ve learned how to deal with them. Which is not to say that I do deal with them — I just know how to deal with them. So, in the off chance that my experience with nincompoopery can help some of you out there, I’ll tell you what the various types of ‘lateness’ are, and what you should do when faced with each. And then… what I actually do most of the time. Because I’m a moron that way. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, people. There can be only one.
So, on to the ‘Six Stages of Tardiness‘:
Stage 1: ‘Hmmm… I Bet I Could Do One More Thing Before I Go’
Description: This is the onramp to the road of lateness. At this point, you’re not actually late yet. But you’re about to be. You know you need to be somewhere, but you look at your watch, or your clock, and see that the time hasn’t yet arrived. You’ve still got ten, maybe fifteen minutes. You’re cool.
Of course, what you fail to take into account is that you’re still in bed, and your meeting is ten miles away, on the other side of a shower, shave, and a hair-raising commute. Or you’re heading to bed, but your ‘one more thing’ involves a two-hundred page book, or watching Roots on TV, or… I don’t know, twins.
Any way you slice it, that ‘one more thing’ is gonna cost you too much time and a nice big slice of sanity. It’s best to just say ‘no‘.
What Should Happen: Um, you’d just say ‘no‘.
(Well, duh. What’d I just say?)
You’d get off your ass and get whereever the hell you’re going. That ‘one more thing’ would wait, and you’d actually have a steam-heated snowball’s chance of getting somewhere on time. For once.
What Actually Happens: The lure of the ‘one more thing’ grabs you by the scalp and sucks the smarts out of your brain. You fiddle, and piddle, and fart around for the ten or fifteen minutes you had, then ten or fifteen more. You’re now officially late, and you’re no closer to your goal. Congratulations — you’re officially a lazy-assed chowderhead. Proceed in an orderly fashion to:
Stage 2: ‘Sure, I’m Late… But I’m Not Late Late’:
Description: This is where you realize that you’re not going to be ‘on time, per se, but you find a way to convince yourself that you can still be reasonably on time. Close to on time. Approximately on time. Not ‘on time’, but something vaguely similar. You are now dabbling in the black art of ‘airline logic’, where ‘twenty minutes late, with no peanuts and a damned kid screaming in your ear the whole trip’ somehow counts as ‘on time’. It’s the Twilight Zone, and you’re on Bizarro World time. You can come up with any kind of outlandish shit, and it makes perfect sense to you.
Your optimism is unmatched — ‘Well, I can shower in thirty seconds, as long as I don’t actually use any soap…‘
Your grasp of physics down the tubes — ‘Lessee, thirteen seconds to dress, two to comb my hair, and eight seconds to brush my teeth…‘
Your mathematical skills on hyperdrive — ‘Six minutes to downtown, two to the parking lot, another two to get in the building, up the elevator — I’ll only be five minutes late!‘
Never mind that you always take time during your shower to actually bathe (and to sing the Rubber Ducky Song, which is — at best — disturbing), that you can’t even get the damned cap off the tube of toothpaste in eight seconds, or that you’ve never managed to negotiate the gridlock between your house and your office in less than thirty minutes, much less ten. Because this is stage two — anything is possible, just so long as you don’t actually think about it too hard, or use any of your past experience as a guide. You’re Superman, without the cape accoutrement. You’re invincible.
What Should Happen: Panic should be setting in at this point. You should be wrapping up whatever the hell distracted you for this long, and getting your ass in gear. If you’re late for something where other people are involved, you should be looking up their phone numbers, trying to reach them to say that you’ll be just the teensiest bit late. Covering your ass, managing expectations, saving your damned job — whatever you want to call it, now is the time to pull your shit together.
What Actually Happens: The seductive power of your pseudo-chrono-logic washes over you, giving you a false sense of confidence and security. You pooh-pooh those sensible little voices in your head telling you to get on with it — ‘Hey, I’ve been late before,’ you say to yourself. ‘And didn’t I just say that I was only gonna be five minutes late? That’s nothing. Hell, I should almost wait a couple of minutes longer. If I’m gonna be late, I might as well do it right.‘
At this point, the still-functioning brain cells are cowering in fear in the back of your brain. They’re planning a revolt to snap you back into some semblance of reality, but they don’t yet have the numbers to fight through the web of lies and fairy tales that you’ve constructed for yourself. Finally, though, your lump of working neurons reach critical mass and revolt, tailspinning you into:
Stage 3: ‘Oh Shit, My Wife/Husband/Parents/Brain/Boss/Legal Guardian/Pimp/Dominatrix Is Gonna Kill Me’:
Description: Like a shot through the eye, it finally hits you — you’re late. And you’re not just late; you’re really fucking late. Whereever it is you’re supposed to be, the time has come and gone. Maybe the meeting’s already started without you, or the plane’s about to leave the ground, or your date is actively huffing and stomping around and cursing you and all who share your gender. Or maybe it’s just way past your bedtime. Whatever it is, you’re cooked. And you’re about to get served up on a platter with a side of fries, and be chewed the hell up and spit the hell out.
(Or chewed out and spit up, depending on who’s got the knife and fork in their hands. Pimps can be so unforgiving.)
What Should Happen: A steady stream of profuse, sincere, creative apologizing, preferably in person, but at least on the phone, if you haven’t actually made it to the site of your flogging yet. You must tell anyone who will listen that you are sorry, that you’re a nimrod, and that this will never, ever, EVER happen again.
You should be begging for your life, or your marraige, or your job. Or, if it’s your brain you’re pissing off by being late to bed, you should be begging it not to make you fall down the stairs in the morning, or let you walk out of the house with your fly unzipped. Whatever the case, you should be in full-on, knees-to-the-floor grovel mode. Wide-eyed, repentant, and above all, sorry. And make it convincing.
(No matter how many times you’ve given the speech. And believe me — it gets harder to make it fly every time you go through the spiel. You can only cry wolf so many times before your grandma gets eaten. Or… um, something. You know what I mean, dammit!)
What Actually Happens: In your panicked state, you finally stop horsing around and start moving toward your goal. In your rush, though, you cause more problems than you solve. You fumble your car keys across the floor, or you turn the wrong way down a one-way street. You accidentally tie knots in your shoelaces, or forget your briefcase and have to retrieve it. Essentially, at this point you’re a little sound and a lot of fury, but you’re not actually accomplishing anything. It’s wasting time, without all that lazy-day, devil-may-care enjoyment. You’re running full-speed on a treadmill, or going around and around in a revolving door. Wowsy wowsy. Woo woo.
And if you’re not being part of the problem, then the rest of the damned world is picking up the slack. Your computer shuts off, with just one more paragraph to finish. Or the traffic lights line up in a chorus of red, red, and more frigging red. Grandmas drive in front of you. Your office buidling elevators are under repair. Funeral processions block your path.
(Lousy damned dead people, anyway — who do they think they are?)
Finally, you realize that you’re not going to get out of this with the truth alone. If it gets out that you’re late because you just had to finish the chapter of the book you’re reading, or you simply couldn’t leave the house until you finished that mission in Rainbow Six, you’re gonna get creamed. And so, like swallows returning to Capistrano, you find yourself in the familiar clutches of:
Stage 4: ‘I Had Better Invent a Damned Good Excuse By the Time I Get There’:
Description: This is it — you’re on the spot, and you need an explanation. And after the dubious math and questionable planning you’ve been doing so far, there’s little hope that you’ll be able to save your ass convincingly. What you need is a plausible lie — one that could be true, that isn’t easy to verify (or in this case, refute), and one that doesn’t need a lot of detail, lest you get your wires crossed and blow it. This is where you need a cool head, a cunning mind, and nerves of steel.
(Or, in my case, lots and lots and lots of practice. Bleh.)
What Should Happen: You should take a few deep breaths, calm yourself down, and think of several scenarios that you could use to cover your ass. You should examine each of these potential alibis, and rate each one on plausibility, complexity, verifiability, and whether or not you’ve used that excuse in the past three days or so. (At least in front of the person or people you’re about to lay it on.) In the end, you should have a lie that even a child could tell and get away with — simple, elegant, and utterly believable. It should almost tell itself, stepping up like a big brother, or a good lawyer (oxymoronic though that may be), to defend your good name, on your behalf.
What Actually Happens: As the walls of your self-imposed prison close in on you, you start to hyperventilate. Realizing the trouble you’re in, and unable to quiet your pounding heart, you reach for the first batch of ludicrous bullshit your fevered brain can sling, and cling onto it for dear life. Other wild and outlandish crap may come zinging across your field of consciousness — some of it clearly better than that first bit of nonsense — but you hold fast to that first intuitive stab at an excuse. You have to take the contestant’s first answer, no matter how preposterously asinine it may be.
And so, you arm yourself with ‘Well, there was this big kangaroo escape at the zoo…‘, or ‘I’m sorry, I had to perform an emergency appendectomy at… um, my poker club…‘, or even ‘No, really, I was abducted again. Seriously! Them little green men just can’t stop with the anal probes — I dunno whut I ever done ta them!‘
If you’re lucky, you’ll still have one little glimmer — just the merest hint — of sanity left. And it will tell you, in no uncertain terms: ‘That shit won’t fly, man! If that’s the best you’ve got, you are screwed! Kiss your ass goodbye right now.‘ And you’ll realize that you simply aren’t equipped to make your appointment at all at this point. Welcome to:
Stage 5: ‘Another Ten Minutes and I Could Just Not Go at All’:
Description: You begin to weigh the benefits of just bagging your appointment, or date, or meeting altogether. Sometimes, it’s better to miss the whole thing, rather than stepping in an hour late. Weddings are often like this, as are most first dates, and many school exams. If you’re late getting to bed, this is the time you realize that you might be better off just staying up all night. Well, ‘realize’ is a bit strong, I suppose. ‘Imagine’, maybe. ‘Pretend’. ‘Dream’. But not ‘realize’; yeah, that’s not really it at all.
What Should Happen: You should again keep a cool head, and soberly determine whether being conspicuously absent is going to hurt you more than being painfully obviously late. Weigh the pros — which really boils down to ‘more time to think of a good excuse’ — against the possible cons — unemployment, divorce, dementia, failing out of school, being burned in effigy.. whatever.. Decide how likely, and how severe, the punishment might be, and just how silver-tongued you’d have to be to get out of ditching the whole thing altogether. It’s rare, but every so often — once in a blue moon — this really is the way to go. Rarely. It’s a risky move, only to be undertaken after long, careful consideration.
What Actually Happens: As soon as the merest hint of the thought of even considering the idea of not showing up at all enters your mind, the decision is made. You’re not going. You never were going. You can go back to whatever the hell you were doing, and it’s going to be fine. You’ll find an excuse, and you’ll make it up some other time. You can say you were sick, or called out of town, or you had a ‘family emergency’.
Ah, yes, that ever-so-personal, rarely-questioned, never-detailed gem of an excuse — the ‘family emergency’. That’s all you ever need to tell people — just look solemn, and bow your head just a bit, and mumble, ‘I’m sorry. I had a… a… family emergency.‘ It’s like a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Nobody will ask you about it, and you’re not obligated to tell. It’s a private matter, a family emergency. Unless you’re actually trying to pull a fast one on a parent, or your spouse, you’re in the clear. Just don’t use it every damned time, of course. This isn’t a frigging soap opera, now — no family this side of the Ewings has a damned emergency every week. Be cool, and you might get away with it now and then.
But, assuming you don’t get away with it — maybe it is your wife you have to fool, or the event is just too important to even be late for, much less miss — then you’re down to your last choice. The end of the road, with nowhere else to turn. You’ve gone and done it now; you’re reached:
Stage 6: ‘Well, That’s It Then — I Can Never Show My Face Here Ever Again’:
Description: There’s really no choice to be made here. This happens when you miss your own wedding, or your child being born, or the plane to Vegas for that trip you’ve been planning with your buddies for the past six years. There’s simply nothing you can do, other than pick your life up and plop it down somewhere else. It’s over — you’re screwed, and there’s no magic potion or salve on the planet that can unscrew you now. This is where you cut your losses and walk away.
What Should Happen: You should pack all your things, hop into your car, and drive in whichever direction points toward the biggest stretch of dry land to drive on. When you get tired — but a minimum of five hundred miles later — you can stop, and try to find a new niche to fit into. Change things up, if you want — become a beekeeper, or a belly dancer, or a professional skywriter. Do something fun, or interesting, or just different. But do something, because you ain’t never going back, child. This is your new life now. Get the hell used to it, dickhead.
What Actually Happens: Honestly, I don’t quite know. I made it to the church on time, I am so not having kids, and that Vegas trip hasn’t come together yet. So I haven’t sunk quite this low yet — though I admit I’ve been close more than once. I got very good at answering just enough test questions in the last twelve minutes of a class to pass the damned thing. Which is good, because I showed up more than once with just twelve minutes left, unshaven and still in my jammies, desperate to stay in school.
(Where the beer was. What the hell did you think I meant?)
And hopefully, I’ll never have to go down this road. I may be hanging on by a thread, flirting almost daily with Stage 4 and Stage 5, but I’ve not bitten the big fat one quite yet. Still, I keep a bag packed, just in case. Given my sad and chronic condition, it’s only a matter of time, and I don’t know how long I’ll have before people come looking for me, torches and pitchforks in hand. So I made sure to be prepared. I’ll take all the lead time I can get.
So, I hope this little lesson has helped you. Maybe you can avoid the shame and embarrassment my wretched disease has cost me in the past. And, frankly, still costs me. Hell, just look at me now. The clock’s turned over to Tuesday, and here I am, wrapping up this post (‘Ooh, just one more thing before bed!‘) at — what the hell is it now, two? Two thirty?
Two thirty-nine, actually. And I’ve got a nine o’clock meeting in the morning. Which I’ll be late to, of course. As usual. Hell, I’m almost late already! I’m in Stage 4 of ‘late for bed‘, and almost in Stage 1 of ‘late for the meeting‘. Woo — look at me multitask!
Feh. Screw this; I’m going to bed. I’m sure I’ll read this later and better appreciate the delicious irony of being made very, very late for bed by blogging about always being late. But for now, I’m just pooped. And I’m out of lame-ass excuses to stay awake any longer, so I’m hitting the sack. I just hope I’m not too late for that meeting in the morning. I’d hate to hit Stage 6 so soon — I was just starting to like my new job. G’night!
Permalink | 1 CommentAh, the joys of owning a home. Or in this case, a yard.
I don’t remember buying a house in the middle of a fricking forest, but that must be what happened. How else could we end up with dead leaves a foot deep in the back yard? I went back there yesterday to rake them up, and could barely wade through the damned things. We lost the dog for a while — we had to strap a snorkel to her ass, so we could see the breathing tube sticking up out of the leaf piles.
(Which worked out okay until she started farting. Not only did it tootle out the top like a train whistle, but it seems to have permanently fogged up the mask.
Yeah, I think I’m done with scuba for a while. Ick.)
Anyway, I raked myself a path out to the middle of the yard, and went to work. And work, and work, and more work. Honestly, I think the bastards around us must have raked their yards, and dumped all their shit into ours. While we were sleeping, maybe, or… um, at work. It could happen. And then they… uh, smoothed them all out, to make an even layer, so no one would suspect. Yes, I’m sure that’s what they did. Now all I’ve got to do is prove it, or at least keep them from coming back. Bear traps and land mines ought to do the trick.
(Hey, it worked so well for the gopher problem we used to have, that’s how I solve all our yard-related problems now. Bear traps and land mines have gotten rid of skunks, and ants, and most of the weeds in the yard. Well, okay, to be fair, they took out a lot of the flowers, too… not to mention the left side of the porch. Still, I think it’s been worth the effort.
Of course, we do go through an awful lot of mailmen. I guess we should probably put up warning signs or something. Or at least stop leaving traps in the mailbox. But you never know where those pesky ants are going to crawl. You can never be too careful.)
But all of that didn’t help me with the leaves I already had. And believe me, I tried. I set up a chain of firecrackers, hoping to burn the leaves away. In hindsight, I suppose I should have realized that was a bad idea. All I got was a bunch of ‘leafetti’ raining down on my head. Oh, and I managed to catch the grill on fire. And while fire in a grill is good, bright yellow flames burning the hell out of the outside of the grill are generally not what you want.
So, I put the fire out. But our grill is now a nice golden brown. In a pinch, I might throw it on a roll and try to eat it. Bitches.
Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and got to work on the leaves. Now, don’t get the wrong idea, either. I didn’t use any of those newfangled, fancy-shmancy modern lawn tools. I’m a traditionalist, folks. I’m a throwback. ‘Old-school‘, I think the kids call it.
In other words, I’m poor. You see, actually owning some green space within twenty miles of Boston doesn’t leave you with much ‘green space’ in the old wallet to put towards lawn maintenance. So we make do with the tools our parents, and grandparents, and Neanderthal ancestors, used. We’ve got a rake, and a shovel, and a pack of leaf bags. That’s pretty much it.
(Well, to be honest, we did save up our money and buy a lawnmower this summer, too. Which was a relief — clipping the lawn with a pair of scissors was getting pretty damned old. I was considering just dumping peanut butter all over the yard and letting the dog do the work for us. That’s when my wife suggested the lawnmower. She always has such good ideas.)
So I went at it with the rake, and after a couple of hours, I had two chest-high piles of leaves. But that wasn’t the truly onerous part. Oh, no — not by a longshot. The bagging is ten times harder than the raking.
(Bagging’s always the hardest part of anything. Ask a hunter, or maybe a coroner. Or even a horny teenager; they know. They wish they did, anyway.)
Luckily, though, I had some help. My wife came out for a little bagging party. (Yeah, I’m gonna leave that one alone. Think what you want.) And soon enough, we had several big-ass bags full of leaves and stored under the porch. That’s when I took a good look around the yard, and recoiled in horror at what I saw.
It wasn’t the ground that concerned me — oh, there were still a few leaves here and there, littered on the lawn like drunken frat boys after a kegger. (Sorry, we’re in New England. That’s keggah. A wicked pissah keggah!) And the grill was still smoldering. But I was over that already. No, what really got my knickers in a twist was what I saw on the trees — all the damned trees lining the properties around us still had loads of leaves! Thousands of the little bastards, just waiting to die and drop onto my property. How fucking rude!
(Look, you don’t see me dying and dragging myself into their tree trunks, or draping myself on their branches, now, do you? No. It’s just common courtesy. You’d think these damned leaves would get with the program already.)
That’s when I realized that the circle of back-breaking yard work is never-ending. As soon as you’re done with one batch of Nature’s little tree turds, another round starts plopping down onto your shit. And then you’ve got to rake those. And over, and over, until the snow falls, and then you’ve got to shovel that shit up. In the spring, there’s apparently something called ‘planting’, or ‘seeding’. Sounds hard. And then you mow the grass all summer, until before you know it, you’re back to the damned leaves! Shit! Who’s idea was this ‘yard’ thing, anyway? Can I just pave over the thing and be done with it? It’s not like I’m gonna grow frigging wheat out there — so why the hell do I have to bother with it?
Eh, this sucks. But maybe I’ll get lucky this year. Hell, it’s already mid-November, and this is New England — the blizzards should be starting any day now. Maybe those leaves that are left will get caught by surprise, and get flash-frozen right on their nasty little stalks. They can sit there freezing on the trees for all I give a damn. Just so long as I don’t have to deal with them.
But what if they do fall? What then? Well, I’m not bagging the little fuckers, I’ll tell you that. Once a year is enough. I’ll rake ’em if I have to, but that’s it. I’ll just leave the pile there for the winter, like some sort of leafery burial ground. That’ll teach the bastards to keel over on my lawn. I have a policy on my property — if you die there, then you’d damned well better be sure to drag your carcass away before I find it. Or have it dragged for you, ’cause I’m not likely to do it. And we’ve got the remains of our gopher friends out there to prove it.
(The mailmen, we cleaned up — all those letters and catalogs were clogging up the drainpipes.)
Anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’m done with leaves this year, but it doesn’t look good. Another couple of weeks without snow, and I’ll be up to my ass again in dead tree parts. The neighbors better hope that doesn’t happen. ‘Cause next time, my leaves are getting dumped in their yards. Yeah, baby — payback is a bitch. I’m onto you people, do you hear me? I’m onto you!
Permalink | 5 Comments(Note: Yes, I’m backdating this post by a few hours. Again. At least this time, I have a good excuse.
(Assuming that laziness, exhaustion, procrastination, and distractedness — the ones I’ve used in the past — aren’t good excuses. Even though I think they are. Nyah.)
Anyway, this time my tardiness has a technical explanation — apparently my wireless router hiccuped yesterday and stopped talking to my ISP’s DNS server. Maybe they had a spat of some kind. Maybe the router was upset that the DNS server never calls any more. (Just like a man.) Or maybe they’ve both got their eye on some hot mailserver out there. Something. Anyway, they got snarky with each other, and I lost all access to the web at large.
(Well, that’s not entirely true, I suppose. If I’d known the IP addresses for Blogger, and Yahoo, and the rest of the places I wanted to go, I guess I wouldn’t really have needed the DNS server. But I didn’t. Maybe I should start memorizing those for future reference. Yeah, that should be fun.)
So, to make a long story… um, marginally less long, I finally called my ISP this morning (because I didn’t know the problem was on my end), and — after some initial diagnostics — the tech support guy gave me the universal, highly technical, time-tested, expert advice that I give people when they come to me with computer problems:
‘Uh… did you try turning it off and back on?’
Shit. Why the hell didn’t I think of that? If the printer’s screwed, what do I do? Off and back on. When my computer locks up? Reboot. So what happens when the network suddenly goes belly up? Well, um, I wait sixteen hours or so, then call my ISP. And what do they tell me? ‘Restart your router, stupid.’
(In a very nice, friendly, customer-friendly sort of way, of course. They know who pays the checks.)
*sigh* I’m such a tool sometimes.)
So. I thought about bitching about last night’s horrendously unfunny Saturday Night Live / Mad TV episodes. But I just can’t find the energy. I’m depressed that there’s no good sketch comedy on TV any more. Sure, SNL has hit lulls before — the post-Eddie Murphy era, the dark times right after guys like Mike Myers jumped ship — but I’ve seen very little in the past couple of years that suggests they’re close to coming out of their current flat funk.
(Seriously — Hall and Oates custom-singing at a business conference? Why would that be funny? And why Hall and Oates? Who the hell cares?)
Ugh. It just makes my funny bone hurt.
(Andy Roddick as host? *sniff sniff* Is it just me, or am I catching the faint whiff of ‘desperation’? Maybe SNL’s not bringing in the cool kiddies any more.)
Where are the Dana Carveys, the Eddie Murphys, the Chris Farleys?
(Well, okay, I suppose we have a pretty good idea of where Chris Farley is right now. Bad example. Sorry.)
That’s to say nothing of the show’s heyday — Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Jim Belushi… shit, I’d settle for John Belushi right now. Or Rob Schneider, for chrissakes. David Spade, Kevin Nealon — give me something! Placate me, dammit! Even Victoria freakin’ Jackson would be… um, no, never mind. She was the worst. Forget I mentioned her. Sheesh.
And it used to be that I could turn to Mad TV for relief. Miss Swan (‘Rooka rike a man.‘) would help, and Stuart (‘No…. noooooo… look what I can do!’) pitched in; even Lorraine (‘God, that’s cute! Hurmph!’) lent an occasional hand. But that show’s gone down the craptube, too — last night, with plenty of old regulars back, they chose to go with Will Sasso’s Kenny Rogers (damn, what brain-deficient bumbleass decided that character should get more than one sketch? Mumbling, bumbling semi-famous has-been Southern nonsense was funny for the first couple of minutes, but skit after skit after skit?), Nicole Sullivan and Michael McDonald as the ‘literally‘ twins (ugh!), and Aries Spears’ ‘Real M************ News‘ nightmare. From what I gather, I missed a few of the better sketches, but still — for a big ‘special show’, shouldn’t most of the material be good? Not half, or some, or a little, but most? Is that asking too much?
Well, apparently. Mad TV is still the better option, but last night was just damned depressing. I watched for over an hour, and the most entertaining thing I saw was Tina Fey shaking her stuff along with the other SNL chickies during Andy Roddick’s monologue-that-wasn’t. I don’t know what the hell they fed ‘Tangy Tina’ before that little bit, but she was the rump-shakin’est of anyone out there. She always seems so straight-laced and calm in most of her sketches — I didn’t even know she had a jiggy to get with. Color me impressed.
Okay, that’s enough. I said I wasn’t gonna bitch, right? Oh, well. So much for ‘best-laid plans’. Eh. I can’t help it if I have high humor expectations. It’s not my fault. It’s those people who wrote the good shit back in the day — the Conehead family, and the wild and crrrrazy guys, and ‘Jane, you ignorant slut.’ If they’d never shown me Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, or Wayne’s World, or even the Church Lady, then I wouldn’t be demanding something just as good now. Seriously, my tastes haven’t changed much.
(Since I was eight or so, come to think of it. Obvious, isn’t it?)
So it’s not my fault. It must be the writers, and the actors, and whoever’s running the crappified versions of these once-funny shows.
Heh. Finally I’ve found a scapegoat. Cool. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Or at least while I have someone else to blame. I don’t get to do it often, you know.
Permalink | No CommentsWell, today’s the day. Today I enter the infancy of my standup comedy career.
All right, so technically, it’s not quite the ‘infancy’ yet. My first show’s not tonight, or anything official like that. So I guess I’m still in my… um, fetusry.
(Or something. Ew.)
But the point is that I’m about to get serious. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come up with material. I refined some stuff, I reworked other bits, and a lot of it I crumpled into tight little balls and buried in the yard. And then peed on the spot, and covered it up with leaves. Believe me, I am capable of dreaming up some horrible, unfunny shit.
(Yeah, I know — I’m preaching to the choir. Suck me.)
Anyway, there was some crap that made the cut. About twenty minutes’ worth, in fact. So today I have to make some tough choices. I have to edit, to winnow. To separate the chaff from… well, from the other chaff, pretty much. None of this is friggin’ Shakespeare, after all. But again, that’s not the point.
All I’m saying is, it’s gonna be tough. These little skits and bits are my babies now.
(Well, except that they don’t produce any green poop or early-morning screaming fits. There’s still a bit of projectile vomiting from time to time, of course, but that’s okay. It’s usually not mine, and that’s all that’s important.)
But how to choose? How to choose?! Do I cut the ‘assbag’ bit, or leave out the ‘wet spots’ routine? Do I do the thing that ends with ‘licking herpes’? Then I might have to leave out the part about being ‘in my bedroom with a cucumber for an hour and a half’. Oh, they’re all so priceless — how on earth can I be expected to choose?
(And yes, if you’ve been paying close attention, versions of most of this crap have appeared here on this very site. That’s right — you saw it here first, whether you wanted to or not. Hopefully, you still manage to sleep at night.)
Anyway, by the end of the day, I’ll have a five minute set all ready. There’s a ‘dry run’ on Tuesday — on stage, but with an empty house — and then next Sunday’s the big show. I guess that counts as the ‘wet run’.
(Which could be taken several different ways, very few of them good. Unless this was a porn movie shoot. Which it isn’t. Damn.)
And we’ll see what happens after that.
So hopefully it’ll go well, and I won’t leave anything good on the cutting-room floor. Assuming there’s anything good in the first place. And assuming that I actually had a ‘cutting room’, which I don’t. I’ll probably end up doing the deed in the basement, or the spare bedroom. Somewhere out of the way, where I won’t be disturbed — or embarrassed, by getting caught in the act of miming how I ‘raise the roof’ or ‘eat like a bird’.
(Jeez. How the hell did I fall into this crappile, anyway?)
But getting the set together’s not the end of the process. Oh, no. Once I have something ready, then I’ll have to practice. And record it, and time it, and play it back while I cringe in horror and make the ‘I sound like that?!?’ face. Yeah, that’ll be fun. I’ll probably have to do that a few times, too, to get the timing down. It’ll be a little repeating loop of me being a moron over and over, with slight variations each time. Like when I went around to every girl in my class in high school, trying to score a prom date. Or that time I ended up on the wrong side of a plate-glass door from the keg at a party a few weeks ago.
(As in:
‘Hey, beer!‘
‘Ow! Shit!‘
‘Hey, beer!‘
‘Damn! That hurts!‘
‘‘Hey, look. A keg!‘
‘Ouch! Ow-ow-ow! Oh, hoppy goodness, why hast thou forsaken me?!‘)
Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes. And, of course, I’ll keep writing this drivel down, and maybe I’ll find something else I can use. (Like ‘fetusry’. Hey, shut up! You never know.) In the meantime, I’m off to talk to myself in the mirror. At least this time, I’ll have a good reason.
Permalink | 4 CommentsYou know what really bakes my muffins?
(Hmmm. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, muffins are nice, right? They’re usually pretty tasty.
Ooh, and they smell nice, too. In a pinch — like when you’re out of deodorant — you can rub ’em under your arms to ‘freshen up’. Of course, you wouldn’t eat them then. Unless you’ve got some sort of fetish thing going on that involves sweaty, musky, damp muffins. Or the armpits they rubbed up against. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ‘Weird’ with that, yes. ‘Disturbing‘ with that, certainly. But ‘wrong’? Um, yeah — come to think of it, maybe so.
Look, all this talk about sweaty pit muffins is getting us nowhere.
(And yes, I do say that to all the girls. However did you know?)
Maybe I should just start over.)
So. You know what really tweaks my nipples?
(Okay, wait, hold on right there. Stop. Time out.
To be honest, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing, either. Gimme a second; I’ll check.
Yee-ouch! Ow ow ow ow ow! Holy shit, OUCH!
Um… yeah, that was actually pretty good. I’m strangely excited now. Shit. I guess I can’t use that one, either.
Okay, let’s try this again. Take three.)
Ahem. Hi there. You know what really burns my ass?
(Well, that sounds like what I’m looking for. Just to be safe, though, I’d better make sure. Hold on — the stove’s in the other room. I’ll be right back.
<…time passes…>
Um. Yeah. That really pissed me off. That’s the one I’m looking for, all right. Anybody out there got any Bactine? Aloe, maybe? Some sort of ass Band-Aid? Anyone?
Hey, don’t give me that look. I had to make sure I picked the right saying for the occasion. I’m willing to suffer for my art, even if it means roasting my assflesh to a nice golden brown.
Ooh, ooh — it’s ‘Choose Your Own Punchline‘ time — pick the one you like best to end this train wreck of an aside. Which of these goes best after the ‘assflesh’ line above?:
Don’t go saying I never gave you options, folks. Get in there and participate! Woo!)
Okay, I think we’re (finally) ready to get this damned entry started. Once more, from the top! And… action!
You know what really burns my ass?
(Um, besides the stove, that is.)
Lucky bastards, that’s what.
And I’m not talking about all lucky people here — I really mean the bastards out there, who happen to get lucky through no merit or effort of their own.
I’m sure this shit happens all over the place — in business, and love, and even in Vegas — but the place where I notice it the most is on the road. And boy, it burns my ass.
Now, I’ve talked a couple of times (here, for instance, and also here) about the lobotomized hyperactive boobs that are Masshole drivers. I’m truly beginning to think that part of the driving exam in the Boston area involves jamming the business end of an electric mixer as far as it’ll go up your nose, and setting it on puree for thirty seconds. And then developing a crack addiction.
(No, I don’t know how you’d document a crack addiction to the DMV’s satisfaction. Maybe a form from your dealer, signed in triplicate? Dunno. I’m just saying. Don’t be a smartass, man.)
But I’m past that. Mostly. Maybe ‘accustomed to it’ would be more accurate. I’ve sufficiently lowered my expectations, such that I now expect — even anticipate — asinine, oblivious, idiotic assholery out on the roads. Oh, occasionally, a drooling dumbass will manage to surprise and enrage me, but it’s happening less and less often. Generally, things are Zen. Very Zen.
So, when some sport utility bitch cuts across three lanes of traffic — two of them oncoming — to make a left turn, or a plodding peckernose just has to pull in front of me from a side street, and is then compelled to drive at six miles an hour… I can deal with it. I don’t like it. I’m not happy. But I can control the urge to pull the cluetards out of their vehicles and shove their tires up their tailpipes. If you know what I’m saying.
However. All of that changes if one of these vehiculosers actually manages to win.
You see, once I’m wronged by Tom Toyota or Vicky Volkswagen, then I have to win. I’m past the point of wishing them bodily harm in response to a dumbass swerve or a dickhead move, but I still have to win. I’ve got to get where I’m going before they do. As long as we’re taking the same path, I’ve got to get ahead of them, to teach them a lesson. Cheaters — and careeners, and cutoffers, and no-signal-using sudden-turning jackhole cocksuckers — never win. Me win. You no win. Arrr.
That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, anyway, in my little world. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the assholes get lucky, and often at my expense. They piddle and crawl toward a green light, until it turns yellow, then race through it as it blinks red, leaving me green-eyed and red-faced myself.
(And, I suppose you could say, yellow with piss and vinegar. But that’s nasty.)
Or the numbnuts continues to pull his or her death-defying, anger-inducing stunts on drivers in front of me, and manages to scoot on down the road before I do. And that’s just wrong. What kind of a world are we living in, anyway, where I don’t get the chance to cut them off? Where I can’t center my car in the two lanes directly in front of their car, and then drive like a turtle on Valium? Where my ass gets boxed in behind a semi after they pass it on the right… on the shoulder… at sixty miles an hour… in a school zone? How the hell is that fair?
This shit happens on a regular basis. I get cut off, hemmed in, blocked out, and nearly run into just about every day, often repeatedly. Now, most of the time, I’m able to hustle past most of the goons, and go on about my day confident in the knowledge that I’ve taught them, in a subtle and non-violent way, that their particular brand of vehicular pilotry isn’t the solution. Smart driving’s where it’s at.
But once a week or so, one of the boobjobs gets away, and that’s damned frustrating. It’s another reckless yahoo out there who thinks they’ve got a leg on the rest of us, traffic laws and common courtesy and crosswalkers with the right of way be damned. And that’s not cool. Not to mention very messy. And we’re the ones left cleaning pedestrian parts off our tires, because some jackass was late for his monster truck rally, and couldn’t be bothered to avoid the people trying to leap out of his way. Inconsiderate bastard.
Anyway, that’s my peeve.
(Brought on by a particularly aggressive dimbulb-that-got-away on my way to work this morning. Damn you, slow-witted Chevy Suburban douchebag!)
Sorry to be so negative — and to go on (at length, again) about the drivers around here. My commute pretty much doubled with this new job, so driving among the clueless cartards out there is a bit higher on my list of complaints. I promise to cool it with the commuting rants for a while, though. I think we’ve all had enough.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for some more nipple tweaking. My ass may be burnt, but I can still have a good time. Hey, speaking of which, I wonder if we have any muffins around this place…
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