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Sorry I haven't written recently, friends. I have been very busy and still have no Internet access at home, but to make up for it, I am going to let you, O best beloved, in on my latest million dollar idea.
Sun, September 24, 2006 - 1:29 PM
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I may have hit on the next "Tickle My Teenage Mutant Ninja Pet Rock with a Pog, Billy Bass." Picture a series of magazine ads and TV commercials, featuring beautiful, wealthy people in various stages of undress (shot artistically in black and white of course), each with some of the following copy: N'essence, the new unscented cologne from Zeitgeist - Just three little atoms: two of hydrogen and one of oxygen—that's the magic of N'essence. - One splash of N'essence lasts the whole day, yet is never overpowering. - N'essence can be worn around friends and coworkers who may be sensitive to other colognes. - N'essence allows you to be you. It never smells exactly the same on any two women. Wear it with your favorite deodorant or hair product. N'essence won't clash with any other scents that make up your personal trademark. - N'essence won't stain clothes and is 100% safe for the environment! N'essence contains no artificial ingredients. N'essence, for the woman bold enough to be herself. ... and now for him, Blank Canvas, the unscented aftershave! I'm already designing the bottles and labels. Who's got a little start-up money?
One of the trickier things to do in life, besides tying a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue, is to assess a situation while you're in it. Are you winning or losing?
Wed, August 9, 2006 - 4:31 PM
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Someone runs a stop sign and puts a dent in your new car. Clearly that's bad. Until the next day, that is, when you meet the one great love of your life, who just happens to work at the repair shop. Forty-five years and seven grandchildren later, you wish you could find the guy who hit your car so you could throw him a big party. That's an easy call: ultimately, the wreck was a good thing. Most cases are more subtle. Suppose instead of meeting the love of your life, the accident just makes you drive more cautiously for the next week or so. Your extra awareness means you're able to stop in time and don't hit the toddler who suddenly appears from between two parked cars. In that case, it's likely you wouldn't even make the connection between the accident that happened and the accident that didn't, but the cause and effect are no less real. Of course, there are no guarantees. The toddler could grow up to be president, invade a country in the Middle East, and start World War III. Then, you might be looking for the guy who ran the stop sign so you could wring his neck. What got me thinking about all this is money. I work full time (and just got a nine-cent-an-hour raise), but Saturn must be in my second house. In fact, he must be giddily toilet-papering the place, because I'm broke. We're talking search-the-sofa-cushions-once-more, are-you-gonna-eat-that, pounding-my-laundry-on-the-river-rocks broke. It's OK. It won't last forever, but it does seem to be lasting for now. Life always holds new experiences for us, and so this morning I thought I'd partake of one by selling some plasma. Forty dollars they pay, and you get to keep all the little red cells. There used to be a plasma center a few blocks from where I live, but it closed up years ago, and now the closest one is in Gresham. If you don't know the Portland area, Gresham is a town that was built as an inconvenience. You burn up a lot of gas getting there, and once you arrive you always wish you hadn't. Nonetheless, there I was, bright and early, pumped to be pumping. The nurse-ish looking woman behind the counter asked me for some photo ID and a Social Security card (No Canadian blood!). I flipped open my wallet, but where my driver's licence is supposed to be, there was just an empty space. I laid all of the contents on the counter -- business cards I couldn't remember picking up, CPR and first-aid certification from the Red Cross, maxed-out credit cards, my Social Security card (partial score!), and a message from a fortune cookie that read, "Stop searching. Happiness will come to you." Eventually, I did stop searching, but as I slinked out the door, under the scornful gaze of my fellow riff-raff, I didn't feel happiness had come to me. I felt like a teenager who'd been caught trying to buy beer. Things could have been worse. I did have just enough gas to get home, and no, no police stopped me on the way. Now, I find myself going over "The Curious Case of the Bloodletters Who Wouldn't Let Me" and looking for the toddler who didn't get run over. If tomorrow's headline is "Nine plasma donors hospitalized with rare, nonstop farting disorder," I will, of course, think of what a close call I had. Failing that, I'm impressed with how perfectly my having no gas matches my having no driver's licence, and I think the frisky, hypothetical tot in this situation may be the extra walking I'll be doing between now and payday. Right now, as I compose these last couple of sentences, I'm walking to our beloved library, where I will use a computer to add this to my blog. The weather is fine, and I may even lose a pound or two. Another thing about walking is that it affords one an excellent opportunity to practice tying knots in cherry stems with one's tongue. So, if you're not going to eat that....
"The writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people." I'm not sure who wrote that. I want to say it was Dorothy Parker, so I'm going to. Just try to stop me. It was Dorothy Parker.
Sun, August 6, 2006 - 2:53 PM
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The fact that I can't remember who wrote that is especially annoying, since the writer probably spent the better part of a day getting the words to come out just right, as an example of what she or he -- actually, I think it was Ambrose Bierce. It sounds like an entry in "The Devil's Dictionary" ("writer: someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.') Yes, I'm sure it was Ambrose Bierce. (Dorothy Parker probably wrote, "The writer is someone for whom making passes at girls who wear glasses is harder than it is for other people") -- was talking about. It could have been any writer, though, because it's something every writer knows from personal experience. Even I know this, and I'm a pretty marginal writer. If I were a truly brilliant writer, writing would be so hard I wouldn't be able to do it at all. I had my own little object lesson on the subject this week when I wrote a eulogy for someone who's nowhere close to death, damn him. Here's how the first line evolved: - Egos the size of his aren't found in nature, they don't grow that large. His had been grown in a hothouse and had been developed for just one purpose: to protect an inner fragility that had been a part of him since childhood. ----- - Egos never get that big in their natural environment. His was a hothouse variety, grown for one purpose: to cushion a psychic injury he'd received in childhood and from which he had never recovered. ----- - His was a hothouse ego, grown big enough to cover his innate, psychic fragility. This just in: Thomas Mann wrote that thing about writers. Must have something to do with why you can't go home again. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog entry. ----- - His ego was too big to be real. Something inside had broken, and his swollen self love was the resulting edema. ----- - His enormous ego was no more genuine that a circus clown's size 30 shoes. Inside, his self esteem was size 6. ----- - I could understand his ego; I just couldn't stand it. ----- - I couldn't stand his ego, but I could understand it. ----- - No one could stand his ego, but some of us could understand it. It helped to think of it as having been grown in a hothouse... Wait, Thomas Wolfe wrote "You Can't Go Home Again"! Wolfe, Mann... wolfemann.... Hey, maybe it was Lon Chaney Jr. who wrote that thing about writers. Ha ha ha! No, seriously, it was Thomas Mann. Well, I don't know if this has helped either you or me to understand the writing process any better, but I know now why no one ever asks me to write any eulogies. Cowards.
I might not have noticed this, had I not been studying last week's pay stub a little closer than usual, but my bosses have given me a raise! Yes! Never let it be said that hard work and dedication don't pay off.
Fri, July 21, 2006 - 4:42 PM
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And what are hard work and dedication going for these days? Nine cents an hour. Why, over the course of a week, that adds up to a cup of coffee and a bagel! Unless I leave a tip. Whoa, and then there are taxes to be taken out of it. Better hold the cream cheese. In the 1956 musical "The Pajama Game," factory workers threaten to go on strike if they don't get a raise of seven and a half cents. There was even a snappy little song called "7 1/2 ¢." Fifty years later, and I'm doing better than they did. Not only did I not have to go on strike for this, I didn't even have to ask for it. Why bother to do this? Is there some odd little quirk built into the computer program that gives everyone a random raise of, say, between three and eleven cents when his or her birth month comes around? Is it some tiny call for help from the payroll person, a desperate plea to have someone notice her? Is it tied somehow to the rate of inflation? Not the whole rate of inflation, mind you, but some fraction of it? I think I have figured it out, though some may find my conclusion a bit cynical: psychological warfare. I am long overdue for a performance evaluation. I've worked for this outfit for just about two years now and haven't had a semiannual evaluation since... well, just about two years now. I have been assured that I'll be having one in a few weeks, and this may really be true. Management might feel a twinge about letting my second anniversary come and go without plumping up my personnel file a page or two. After my supervisor and I finish agreeing on what a superlative job I'm doing, I do plan to ask for a raise. Where I work, management doesn't really give you that "smartest guys in the room" feeling. They wouldn't be the smartest guys in the room if they were all alone in a pet shop. Even the Antibraintrust, though, knows that I will laugh my head off if they point to this and say, "But you just had a raise." No, I think they are attempting to frame negotiations. If I have just seen how microscopic a raise can be, they reason, it might deter me from asking for anything substantial. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to retain my fine services for another year without having to pay me a reasonable wage. They won't be able to, but even management sometimes lives on hope.
I just got back from the worst job interview I've ever been on. I'm including no-shows on that list, by the way, and the one where the interviewer's dog kept chewing on my shoe.
Thu, July 13, 2006 - 12:54 PM
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The "suite" I had been directed to was a storefront in a strip mall. The upended desks in its tiny lobby made me think the organization was just moving into its new space, but when Elizabeth Somethingorother led me to her office, I saw they'd actually been there for quite a while. No one would have moved so many dead plants to a new office. The sweatsuited Elizabeth seemed to be about 18, but the little girl playing in the corner was at least 6, so either Elizabeth was older than she looked, or the girl was the world's youngest intern. Up to and including the handshake, things weren't too bad -- her hand wasn't sticky or covered with oozing sores -- but once we sat down and the questions began, we were definitely down the rabbit hole. Elizabeth: Our clients have special needs. How will you meet them? Me: First, I'd have to get to know each person and find out what those needs are. Elizabeth: What do you mean? Me: Well, your clients are all individuals...? Elizabeth: (grimaces, writes something on her paper... or perhaps just doodles.) Are you at ease with the idea of taking a group of psychiatric patients to public events? Me: That would depend on how large a group, and how much direct supervision they needed. Elizabeth: Our clients are all able to dress and feed themselves. Me: Yes, um... well... for outings I assume you have an adequate staff-to-client ratio. Elizabeth: No, we don't. After awhile, she asked me a reasonable question, but what I thought was a reasonable answer seemed to catch her off guard. Lizzy-poo: What shift would you be interested in? Me: My first choice would be a day shift. Lizzy-poo: Ha ha ha ha! That's not gonna happen. Day shifts are for management. We have swing shifts open. Me: (unspoken) Then why did you ask me, you MISERABLE PUNK???? Me: (spoken) I have no problem with swing shifts. By this time, I knew I would never agree to work with this person, even if I were HER boss, and the job came with a Warren Buffet-sized honorarium. I thought to just get up and leave would be rude, though, so I started giving her shorter and shorter answers. Finally, she asked if I had any questions for her. "No," I said. "You don't have any questions for me?" "Not that I could phrase in front of a six-year-old child," I didn't say. "No," I said. She gave me some papers to fill out, and we walked back to the cramped little lobby. I declined the filthy couch she offered (white pants), and stood, pretending to fill out forms until she'd gone. I walked out to my car, tossing the crumpled forms into a dumpster and felt a little guilty for not offering her a clue then and there. I pulled out of the parking lot and thought, "Aw, she's young. She'll figure things out eventually." I made my right onto The Pacific Highway, headed for a good cup of coffee and the crossword puzzle. "And if she doesn't... screw her."
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