Are You 27, 54 or 82?

What’s wrong with me that I so readily remember some simple math calculations that I did over a quarter of a century ago? And worse, that this week I realized that it was time to do them again?

You see, way back when I was twenty-seven I realized that I was approaching my 10,000th day of life. And so with pencil and paper (Did we have calculators back then? I don’t recall.) I figured out the exact date that I would hit that historic milestone. For me it was a few months after my 27th birthday. Well, actually it’s the same for everybody.

And so as I approach my 54th birthday it only stands to reason, ipso fatso, that I will soon be living through my 20,000th day. And so with the third grade math that, happily, I still mostly retain, I figured out that on October 10, 2007 I will be exactly 20,000 days old. (For you purists, October 9th will actually be my 20,000th day but since I didn’t live a complete day on the day of my birth, October 10th (at 7:35 a.m.) is when I will have completed the full 20,000. Are you still with me? Well, I can’t say I blame you.)

What I also found remarkable is that October 10th of next year will also be the 50th birthday of one of my closest friends. I could barely type fast enough this afternoon when I sent the e-mail to tell him the amazing news. I was somewhat surprised when he responded by claiming he was very busy right now and even went so far as to imply that perhaps I had too much time on my hands. It’s several hours later now and I’m beginning to understand that you simply can’t just suddenly drop such an astounding fact on somebody. It may take a while before they are fully able to absorb the enormity of this statistical miracle.

Now hang on to your hats. (You don’t hear that expression much anymore. I wonder if its popularity began to diminish at the same time that hats started going out of style? I better check on that.) In 2007 my dad will turn 82. And so a few weeks after my 20,000th day on Earth he will be celebrating his 30,000th day! Actually that’s not so amazing—it’s the same for any parents who had a child when they were 27. But still…

There is almost no chance that you or anybody you know (and possibly not even me, if you can imagine such a thing) will be around to live their 40,000th day. But it has been done. The oldest documented human ever was Jeanne Calment, who lived to be a nifty 122 years old. Jeanne is one of the special few who woke up to see her 40,000th sunrise, which occurred about six months after her 109th birthday. Your 40,000th day will, of course, also occur about six months after your 109th birthday, if you live long enough to see it. Which you won’t.

So what are you going to do now that you’ve finished reading this nonsense? Are you going to attempt to calculate the number of days you’ve lived? (Don’t forget the leap days!) My guess is probably you won’t. And why should you? You already know that unless you are 27, 54, or 82 (or 109!) you’re not approaching any significant milestone. And besides, doesn't the real answer lie not in spending time counting your days but rather in living them?

The Family Circle/Circus

Although I could recall none of it, I woke up this morning with the knowledge that I had had a long and detailed dream in which I lived in the comic strip The Family Circus. Well, have a cheap glass of Pinot Noir, a xanax and a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream just before bed and you too can enjoy equally curious dreams. And one other thing—don’t go getting all technical on me. I’m fully aware that The Family Circus is not actually a strip but rather a panel, so just calm your jittery nit-picking ass down.

About ten years ago I read a magazine article that rated dozens of popular comic strips. The writers must have given grades to over a hundred of them, but when the smoke cleared there were only three that earned an “A” grade, Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes and, yes, The Family Circus. Now I loved Calvin and Hobbes and I think Doonesbury is brilliant, but The Family Circus? Really? Ahead of Peanuts? The writers of the article sensed that this would be seen as a bizarre choice and so spent quite a few paragraphs attempting to justify their decision. I wasn’t convinced.

Frankly, there have always been a number of things that have confused me about The Family Circus, not the least of which is why I would dream that I was in this fictional family as opposed to, say, in Penelope Cruz. I blame the cheap wine.

Also, I’ve never been quite sure if the name of the strip is The Family Circus or The Family Circle. Well, I’m happy to report that through my usual diligent research I was tonight able to clear up that bit of confusion. It turns out that it actually was originally named The Family Circle, which made sense seeing how it was drawn inside a circle and all. But the grumpy and over-protective folks over at Family Circle magazine got all huffy and puffy and so Bil Keane changed the name of his creation to The Family Circus. And aren’t you glad that you have me around to straighten these things out for you?

There’s another thing about The Family Circus that confused me for quite a while. You know those days when Bil Keane supposedly lets Billy draw the strip and it comes out looking exactly like what you’d expect from a six-year-old? I’m ashamed to admit that I spent more than a few years wondering why the kid’s drawing skills never improved. OK, cut me some slack here, I was just a kid myself. (Actually I don’ t think I fully caught on to the gimmick until I was well into my 30’s, but let’s just keep that little secret between us, shall we?)

Tonight I’m changing things up a bit. Instead of last night’s belly-wash I’m currently sipping a middling Cabernet. I won’t forego the xanax of course (are you insane?) but I think I’ll substitute a granola bar for the chocolate-chip ice cream. Then maybe tonight, instead of those uptight losers from The Family Circus, I can dream about someone I’d actually enjoy spending some time with. For example, I always thought that Andy Capp’s wife was kind of hot.

Trying to Catch the Wind

It was just about twenty years ago that I asked my then girlfriend if she’d like to go see Donovan in concert. I don’t remember her exact words, but she gave me such a “why would I ever want to do that?” look that you might have thought that I had asked her to give an enema to hippopotamus.

I’ve always regretted that I didn’t go see Donovan at that time. I remember thinking that even though he was now an old man listening to him play his music would be a wonderfully nostalgic way to spend an evening. Donovan, incidentally, was about 40 at the time.

Fast forward two decades and I hear that Donovan is again touring, the girlfriend is a fading memory and I’m a married man. There are, of course, many things that I admire about my wife (her superior taste in men, for example) but one particular trait is her willingness to go places and see things whether she’s familiar with them or not. We’ve shared a tent on the African plains and strolled hand-in-hand down a nude beach. We’ve ridden a motor scooter on a Greek Island and marched together in an anti-war protest.

And so I’ve found over the years that whenever I begin a question with, “Would you like to...” it’s not really necessary to ask but rather more of a courtesy. Whether it’s going to a movie, or a Neil Young concert or a street festival I can pretty much assume that the answer will be “yes.” (Although not 100% of the time, mind you. We’re still negotiating that visit to the Power Exchange in San Francisco.)

A few weeks ago we were just driving around when I remembered that I heard that Donovan was touring. “Would you like to go see Donovan?” I asked. The question, I assumed, was just a formality. I mean, this was the woman who had once said yes when I asked her if she wanted to spend Earth Day with me cleaning disgusting clumps of litter from the banks of a local stream. So imagine my surprise, no shock, when she scrunched up her face and answered, “Not really.”

What is it about Donovan that turns people off? And of course I’m only referring to the rapidly shrinking pool of people who have actually heard of Donovan. To be fair, I don’t think my wife could have named a single Donovan tune, but then again she had never heard of Neil Young until I introduced her to him (almost literally!) a few years back and now she loves the whiney old hippie.

So today I checked on the Internet and found that Donovan is indeed currently on tour in the U.S. Sadly, it seems that the tour has just about ended, and that it was limited to the East Coast. In fact just three nights ago he played in Tampa Bay. Had I known I could have called my parents and told them to go see him. To which they would have undoubtedly responded, “Who the hell is Donovan and we thought you had stopped smoking that stuff?”

According to his website Donovan’s next scheduled concert will be in September of 2007. In London. And unless some dramatic changes occur in my life I don’t think I’ll be flying over for the show. That’s OK, I’m not giving up. Maybe I didn’t get to see him in his glory days, or in his forties or in his sixties, but I make a vow before you tonight that if an 80-year-old Donovan tours again 20 years from now I’m going to be there. And if my 2026 girlfriend and/or wife don’t want to go, well that’s just too bad.

Introducing Blog Light

Like the fat old lady who was always a skinny kid I find myself facing a problem that I never thought I would: I have to write less. And don’t believe for a minute that it’s because I want to write less. Hell, if the truth be told, I don’t want to write at all. Every night.

No, in an attempt to hammer my mindless ramblings into a more structured form that is acceptable to other markets (and I think I’ll just keep my plans to myself for now, if you don’t mind) I’ve been advised to keep my columns to about 500-600 words. When I started this blog I thought my problem would be (as it has been in some of the other, more private, aspects of my life) one of too short a length. As it turns out that once I get going I can be quite the literary chatterbox. I would estimate that my average article runs well over 1,000 words and on occasion one may approach 3,000. That means in my roughly 400 blogs I’ve written nearly enough words to make up not one, but two Moby-Dick’s!

And don’t send me any smart-ass e-mails about that last comment. I know I’m not writing any Moby-Dick here and that I’m no Herman Melville. But we’re talking quantity not quality, so you must agree that’s a lot of words, no matter how sloppily written. And who wants to read that many words here at the dawn of the short attention span 21st Century? Nobody, that’s who.

Some of you are probably thinking that it’s going to be easier to write articles of 500 words instead of 1,000. In fact if your second-grade math is correct it’s going to be twice as easy. Let me see, how can I politely put this? You’re a dope. It’s going to be harder--much, much harder. I still have to come up with a new topic every night, but now, instead of just letting it run its 1500 word course until it collapses in an exhausted, poorly written heap, I have to free-base every article down to 500 words. What a pain in the ass this is going to be.

Oh, and that’s another thing. I’m also expected to clean up the language a bit. I suppose from now on I’ll be talking about what a “pain in the neck” writing this thing is. God, that sounds awful—no teeth in it at all. Ah well, I don’t think Melville ever called Moby a pain in the ass, so who am I to quibble?

So here we go. I’m now over 400 words so I better start wrapping this thing up. In truth I think it’s going to be an exciting challenge to hone my columns down to 500 words and probably a beneficial writing exercise as well. I have no doubt that it will be difficult but with a little discipline I’m sure I’ll be able to do it. Now as for the cleaning up of the language—that’s going to be fucking impossible.

TOTAL WORDS: 513

A Girl's Best Friend

“I’m never buying another diamond for as long as I live!” I was surprised by this outburst, not so much for its content but rather its source. I heard it about ten years ago out of the mouth of my boss at the time, a usually quiet, almost painfully shy man. But he had watched a documentary on diamonds the night before and here it was Monday morning and his mind was still afire.

If I remember correctly what had outraged this normally mild-mannered fellow was not so much the labor practices of the DeBeers company, but rather what one might generously call their “marketing plan.” No, my ex-boss didn’t really care if the overlords of the South African mines had regularly shone a flashlight up the hoop-dee-doops of their overworked and underpaid employees. After all, office pilfering can be such a problem for any company and believe me, these folks weren’t looking for staplers up there.

No, I believe what sent my old boss into a rage was the highly controlled distribution of the diamonds, and therefore the creation of artificial demand and prices for what in truth are basically pretty, shiny rocks that have little intrinsic value and are not even particularly rare. A few years later at the tender age of 45 I found myself engaged and I recalled the lessons taught to me by my old boss. But I bought the big glittering diamond anyway. Hell, the girl had waited ten years—what am I going to give her, an amethyst and a lecture on South African mining practices?

Because you chicks just love diamonds. And if you found out that they are really quite common it wouldn’t change your opinion one iota. In fact it would make it stronger. The very idea that a man has spent thousands, even tens of thousands of his hard-earned dollars on a shiny rock just sets your little hearts aflutter, doesn’t it? In fact we could probably replace the traditional giving of diamonds with a simple ceremony where the man flushes wads of cash down the toilet in your honor and you ladies would be just as thrilled. (Except, of course, that you can’t wear a toilet ceremony on your hand and flash it around to make your girlfriends jealous.)

Actually, I like giving jewelry to women, and I always have since the long-ago day I dropped nine big ones on a necklace for my first girlfriend. You remember, the gold-plated one with the genuine simulated diamond? You see, unlike the diamond I am not made of stone, and I still think that giving jewelry to a woman is a rather romantic notion and have done it often. Now Ladies, before you start lining up with your hands out please keep in mind that most of the giggling young beneficiaries of my largess were willing to pay a price in exchange for their twinkly little bauble. Are you? If not, well you really have no reason to get in line, do you?

But here’s what’s really bugging me, and my, it sure took a while to get here, didn’t it? A few years ago those frauds who push diamonds came up with a new type of necklace. It had not one, not two, but three diamonds. Why three? Well there are two schools of thought. The non-threatening but still masculine male voice on the commercial told me that you had to give three diamonds for her “yesterday, today and tomorrow.” Another theory, which I’ll refer to as my theory, says this is a cheap gimmick to make some poor sap buy three diamonds instead of one.

What’s that line about seeing farther only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants? Well, marketing works the same way. Just as nobody is content to have a razor with only three blades when you can now get one with five, this year no self respecting woman should have to face the shame of accepting a three-diamond necklace. Why? Because now they have a new one with seven, yes seven, diamonds! And woe to the man who gives his wife or girlfriend (or both!) last year’s three-diamond model!

Yes Folks, it’s the new 2006 seven-diamond necklace—happily out in the stores just in time for the joyous holiday shopping season! (The necklace, by the way, is shaped like a letter S to allow room for all those sparkling diamonds. I haven’t been able to confirm it in my research, but I have a strong suspicion that the S stands for “sucker.”) And this time the question you should be asking is not why seven diamonds, but rather why do the diamonds get progressively larger the further down the necklace you go? Oh that’s easy! Here’s that soft-spoken man again: “Each stone is larger than its predecessor to remind her that your love is always growing.”

That son of a bitch! And he knows that women eat this nonsense up. And if you don’t believe me try giving her a three-diamond necklace this year. And don’t come crying to me when she looks up at you with dagger-throwing eyes and spits out, “What, our love isn’t growing, you big cheapskate?” Yeah, chum, go ahead and buy that seven-diamond thing like the nice man on TV told you to. I promise you that the only thing that will be “growing” is your credit card debt.

I can’t wait until next year. I know that even as I write this those evil bastards at the diamond company are planning a new necklace encrusted with twelve diamonds. “Tell her you love her every month of the year…” At this point my only hope is that these malevolent diamond hucksters are fated to spend eternity roasting in one of the deeper circles of Hell. Yes, even below the one specially created for those florists who triple the price of roses on Valentine’s Day.

It Was 43 Years Ago Today

“So what were you doing forty-three years ago today?” I asked the guy I was working with, knowing full well that he was only about thirty.
“Not existing yet,” he confirmed without missing a beat.
“I suppose you don’t remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan either?” I snapped.

So what could I do but bore the young punk with the details about where I was when I first heard the news that Kennedy had been shot.

And that’s actually what we did hear first: that John Kennedy had been shot, not that he had been killed. It was announced to me and the rest of my fifth-grade class by our teacher. If I remember correctly, and there’s no reason to believe that I do, he said something like, “I’m not sure if it’s true, children, but I just heard that President Kennedy was shot.”

I do remember quite clearly my reaction to the news. Instant denial. Isn’t it funny how we can trace many of our characteristics (flaws?) right back to our earliest days? “Oh he’ll be just fine,” I assured my classmates and myself. “After all, he survived the PT 109.This is nothing.”

Through the years I’ve had this fantasy/fear that someday, when I was really old, I’d be telling the young folk what it was like on the day Kennedy died. One thing I definitely cannot tell you, however, is exactly when this fantasy turned itself into reality. Nor can I offer any explanation as to how it happened so quickly.

And I’ve become quite delusional besides. I almost have myself convinced when I tell younger people how they “missed out” on the Beatles or the hippie era. They nod politely, but you know they’re thinking that if the cost of having been a witness to this long gone era is being old in 2006, well thanks anyway but I’d rather just keep listening to P. Diddy (or whatever the fuck his name is this week) and remain in my twenties.

My friends and I used to joke about being out of college for five years. “We’re really getting up there,” we’d joke. But suddenly we’ve been out of college not five, but thirty years, we really are getting up there and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore. I mean, my own wife wasn’t around when Kennedy was shot. (She actually was born on the day that the Beatles flew back to England after their first American tour.) And, like my wife, that cute chick in Pleasanton also wasn’t yet born when Kennedy was shot. And believe me we’re not talking about two spring chickens here!

Imagine this. Ninety-five years from now on the 100th anniversary of 9/11 they will probably interview some desiccated bag of bones who was an actual eyewitness to the historic attacks. “My mom had taken me into the city to buy school clothes. You could move about freely back then…” he’ll begin. Don’t you find this scenario mind-blowing? Well, perhaps if you too had just washed down a xanax with a glass of wine you’d be better able to appreciate it.

I, of course, will not be interviewed on the 100th anniversary of 9/11. After all, I’ll be 148 years old and more likely than not will be too grumpy to answer questions for some snot-nosed reporter. Meanwhile I must get it out of my head that the Kennedy assassination was nearly a half a century ago. It’s make me feel like an absolute creaking antique. I know! Tomorrow I’ll find the just right person and ask him to tell me all about Pearl Harbor!

The Great Compromiser

The Great Compromiser—that’s me! This started a few days ago when I won an auction on eBay for a lot of three Mystery Science Theater movies. Regular readers (I’m so delusional) know that my only unfulfilled life goal, now that I’ve used all seven letters in a single turn in Scrabble, is to collect a DVD of every episode of this classic cult program. Having but a few left to find, I was amazed to stumble upon this group of three being auctioned off; three that I didn’t own! You can imagine my excitement! Well, perhaps you can’t. What do you collect—ceramic cats?

After being notified that I had indeed won the auction I returned to the posting in order to pay. I noticed in the description that a line had been added: “These movies are on VHS.” Now, that line had not been there when the auction began, although the letters DVD could be found throughout. I contacted the seller and asked if these were indeed VHS copies, and he confirmed that they were. I wrote back and told him that I had no use for VHS and everything in his description of the product had led me to believe that I was bidding on DVD copies.

For example, the photos of the movies were of DVD copies. I specifically checked that before I bid. Now sometimes a person will post a photo that is not the actual item but only an example of it. In these cases the word “Stock” should appear below the photo. In this case it was not, although further investigation found a line buried in the description that said that these were indeed stock photos.

Besides being plainly visible in the photos, I found the letters DVD several more times in the description, including a phrase that said “DVD release date 2/21/00.” Now he didn’t say that these movies were DVD’s, he was just telling the release date of the DVD. Are you with me here? At no point does the seller say that these are DVD’s but the ad was very misleading; intentionally misleading to my way of thinking.

I wrote to the seller, pointed out all the instances in which I found his posting to be deceptive, told him I didn’t need any VHS copies and what did he want to do about this situation?

The seller wrote back and said my options were to either pay him the amount or he would tag me as a Non-Paying Bidder. Well, I had never heard of that dire sounding phrase before, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t something I wanted to be. I do occasionally buy items off eBay and I didn’t want to have that cyber-scarlet letter hanging around my neck. But I sure didn’t want to pay for three movies that I didn’t want and was feeling more and more that I was tricked into buying.

I wrote back and told the seller in no uncertain terms, no, these are your options. Either you cancel this sale or I will honor it but be forced to leave negative feedback about the way you are conducting your business. (Sellers dread negative feedback.) I even labeled the options “a” and “b” in an attempt to give my argument some vague illusion of legal gravitas.

The seller wrote back, and much too quickly I felt, that option “b” was just fine with him. And so, in order to keep my eBay soul stain-free, I wrote back that I would be making the payment shortly. I didn’t mention the negative feedback with which I had threatened him, but trust me the vats of venom were already roiling in my brain, boiling down into a thick, poisonous ooze that I would soon be loading into my pen. I can be quite the wordsmith when I’m motivated you know, and this deceitful punk certainly had me motivated!

After sending the e-mail I was sitting and fuming about having to pay (and if I told you how little money we’re talking about you’d stop reading right now and leave in disgust) when it hit me. What was the argument here? Well, the seller wanted his money and I wanted those three MST3K movies on DVD for my collection. I immediately sent him another e-mail.

“”It dawns on me that there is an option C,” it began in the most civil voice I had yet used on this guy. In the e-mail I proposed that if he could somehow transfer the three movies onto DVD (and I emphasized that I wanted quality copies here-I still didn’t trust this fucker) that I would be willing to pay the same price. And he, of course, could then keep his VHS copies and auction them again on eBay. I would even have said that this was a win-win situation if I was prone to fall into mindless corporate jargon, which happily I am not.

He again wrote back quickly and when his e-mail began, “Ah, common ground,” I could see that he, too, had developed a more civil tone. It turned out, he told me, that he happened to have access to some kind of fancy edit suite and if I could wait a few days he would send me three high-quality DVD’s of the movies. Three days later the DVD’s arrived, shiny and labeled and of a quality that was better than many of the other movies in my collection. It was the perfect ending: he had gotten his money, I had gotten my DVD’s and everybody was happy. (Except, of course, the people who hold the copyright on the movies.)

And that’s how I became The Great Compromiser. Now unfortunately you’ll find that not every conflict contains a workable solution that is acceptable to both parties, but if each is willing to move a step back, take a deep breath and inject a little civility into the negotiations you might be surprised at what you can achieve. And so now I must ask that you please excuse me. My work is done here and so I’m off to Iraq to straighten out that situation. Honestly, must I do everything around here?

Guess Who # 13

Who says all the Guess Who subjects have to come from the world of entertainment? Not me, and I’m the clown running this carnival. It’s a big world out there, and there are a lot of famous folks who never starred in a movie or had a TV show. There are writers and scientists and painters. (Oh my!)

So let’s begin. Tonight’s subject is a well-known person. His career path is somewhat different from most of our previous subjects, but that’s what makes a horserace eh? So think of tonight’s exercise as broadening our horizon a bit, as well as a fine example of creating an image through the presentation of selective information.

Damn, I hope I’m not giving too much away already. OK, I’m going to shut up now, except to tell you that tonight’s Mister X is male. Which of course you already knew, seeing that he is called Mister X and all. OK, who is he? And no, you may not use the Internet so even don’t ask.

Months before his birth Mr. X had a brother who died of cancer at age 13.

Mr. X’s mother became depressed and tried to abort Mr. X through suicide.

Mr. X has written four novels, including The Fortified Castle and Men and the City.

Mr. X was imprisoned in 1964 but escaped in 1967.

Mr. X established the “National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy.”

For his work in modernizing public health systems Mr. X received an award from the United Nations.

Mr. X was sent to live with his uncle when he was three.

Mr. X’s favorite movie is The Godfather.

It is believe that Mr. X was born sometime between 1935 and 1939.

Mr. X married his uncle’s daughter in 1957

In 2000 Mr. X was ranked #55 on Forbes’ World’s Richest People list

Mr. X was presented with the Key to the City of Detroit in 1980.


OK, that’s enough clues for you. So put on your thinking caps, as my fifth-grade teacher used to say, and tell me: Who is Mr. X ?

Moral Indignation in a Darkened Theater

It was about halfway through the movie and an extremely naked Kate Winslet was perched atop a washing machine being expertly put through the rinse cycle by her illicit lover. Have you even been watching a movie when suddenly you realize you are hearing sounds that are not coming from the soundtrack but from a commotion in the theater? (The all-time greatest of these moments surely was experienced by the folks who were munching popcorn when the cops came in to drag away ol’ Lee Harvey.)

Well it wasn’t nearly so dramatic today, but suddenly I realized somebody was shouting, “This is dirty! This is nasty! These people are supposed to be stars!” Some lady began to bellow because she was shocked, shocked I tell you, by what she was seeing up there on the screen. She continued with her tirade and as I turned to look over my left shoulder I could see that she and her companion were standing and making their way out of the theater, even as some guy answered for all of us and said, “Why don’t you leave, then?”

For the next minute or so you could hear this woman ranting in the lobby, probably heaping abuse on, and demanding a refund from, the poor minimum wage slob who I’m sure couldn’t hand her the money fast enough. In the theater there was scattered laughter, including my own.

Several things surprised me about this incident, and one of them was not that there are self-righteous lunatics among us, bursting with religious fervor and moral indignation that could explode like a land mine at any second. Hell, I know what’s out there.

What surprised me is what set her off. A few weeks ago I saw a mainstream movie called Short Bus. It was a warm, touching film in which the characters had real human problems and emotions; they just also happened to have real sex, right there on camera. And I thought that was terrific—movies have pretended to portray the reality of the human condition for over 100 years. So isn’t it about time that they actually did?

And of course Short Bus is a controversial film and I would have not been particularly surprised if some indignant woman had stalked out in the middle of it. But the movie I saw today was Little Children, and was even mainstreamier than Short Bus and an excellent film besides, but it really didn’t break down any sexual barriers or show anything we haven’t seen many times before. Nor had it intended to.

And so I suppose I was surprised today by this lady’s outraged reaction. Is it possible that she really hadn’t gone to the movies since 1947? And what’s more curious is that she chose to throw her tantrum at that particular scene. It was not the first nude scene in the movie for our Miss Winslet, nor was it the most shocking by my measure. Hell, I’ve seen it all, but it still wasn’t easy to watch the scene when a man was caught by his wife as he masturbated at his computer while wearing a pair of mail-ordered used panties over his face. And that lady didn’t make a peep during that memorable scene. Although I may have.

A few paragraphs back I quoted this lady as having said, “These people are supposed to be stars!” but in truth I couldn’t hear her all that clearly. And yet I’m fairly certain that’s what she said. And again this enforces my theory that this woman hadn’t been to the movies in half a century. After all, you would never catch a bare-assed Katherine Hepburn getting boffed on top of a washing machine. No, not even if it was by Spencer Tracy.

But then I think this line might have meant something else. Perhaps this woman knew exactly who Kate Winslet was; perhaps the only reason that she even came to this movie was because it starred Kate Winslet. And then that’s why she became so outraged. Ah ha! There’s your answer: Titanic! Maybe Titanic had been the only movie this woman had seen since 1947 and she didn’t want to see the innocent young female lead of that oh-so-romantic epic boinking on a major appliance.

Ah, but that theory doesn’t work either. After all, didn’t Kate show her assets even in Titanic? She sure did--that chick just loves getting nekkid. In fact I’d be hard-pressed to name many of her pictures where she didn’t. And God bless her for it.

No, what we have here is simply a lady who was outraged by the sexuality she saw on the screen and made her opinion known. These bluenoses have been around since long before Elvis swiveled his hips and will be with us until the sky goes black. I think hers is a ridiculous opinion and I suspect she’d be hard-pressed to defend it.

Ask her why two (or more!) people making love should not be portrayed on the screen for a voluntary adult audience and she’d tell you it’s dirty. Ask her why it’s dirty and she’ll be out of ideas and more likely than not will fall back to some vague quotation from the Bible. (And then tell you that God was specifically talking about the movies when he said it!)

Yes, I thought her opinion was absurd, especially when directed at such a good movie, but I have to tell you I kind of liked her tactics. After what I’ve seen occur in this country over the last six foul years, a time when nearly everybody sat mutely by in the face of truly immoral behavior, I now tip my hat to nearly anybody who is willing to take a stand and make their opinion known vocally. And loudly.

Career Week: The Grand Finale

Holy moley, judging by the stack of post-its in front of me I could keep this sorry catalog of the crappy jobs in which I’ve wasted the better part of my life immersing myself going on until Christmas. And while I appreciate all the nice folks who have written to tell me they’ve been enjoying the series I think the time is right to bring this Career Week nonsense to an end once and for all. Why? Because while you are merely sitting back and enjoying my tales you must remember that I actually lived them. And frankly with each episode I dredge up from my memory banks I’m finding it harder and harder to revisit them at all.

You know what? That’s not even true. I’ve been enjoying this trip down the memory lane of my dubious employment history at least as much as you have. And if I’ve found myself working in some miserable hellholes, well, it was my choice and they made me what I am today. I wonder if I can still sue?

Never mind, never mind. But one question does come to mind. The last two regular jobs I’ve held lasted a combined total of nearly twenty years. See, I’m actually more stable than you thought. When, then, did I have the time to acquire so many others? Ah well, the life she is long, yes?

Do you know how at the end of the fireworks show they often have The Grand Finale? After shooting off single fireworks for an hour or so they traditionally signal the show’s conclusion by shooting off a whole lot of fireworks at once. Well that’s what I’ll be doing in the column tonight.

So come celebrate the end of Career Week by letting me take you for a wild ride back to as many of my jobs as I can remember. (Excepting those that have been previously mentioned, of course.) And keep in mind, despite the impressive (is that truly the right word?) number of jobs, I suspect that this is by no means a complete list. Ready? Here we go!

How far back do we set the wayback machine in this exercise and what exactly qualifies as a job? As a kid I often had a Kool-Aid stand which took in half a cupful of pennies, nickels, dimes and the rare quarter. It was also the perfect business model, as there was zero overhead: Mom supplied the Kool-Aid and paper cups. Does holding a backyard carnival count as a job? I made a pocketful of change with one or two of these also.

At sixteen, after the umpire experience, I got what I consider to be my first real job. I worked as a busboy at a local pancake restaurant. The owners had to sign papers for the school, since I was still a minor, and when they filled in the blanks I saw that they had written that I would be working three hours a day, four days a week. Imagine my surprise when I worked only two days a week, Friday night and Saturday night, but that the hours were a bit longer than expected. Those bastards had me working two twelve-hour shifts every weekend!

And to this day whenever I find myself in a steamy commercial kitchen the smell brings me back to that horrible place where I often found myself scraping half-eaten syrup-drenched pancakes into the trash with my bare hands. I also have fond memories of being caught by the bitch in charge if I dared to sit down for thirty seconds during non-break time. “Up!” she would bark.

I worked at this forced labor camp only four times—two long, miserable weekends. Then I began my new job, which was at a drive-thru milk store. I’m not sure if they are still around. Think of a Photo-Mat where instead of film people could get milk, bread, ice cream and other staples without ever being in danger having to get out of their cars or even off their fat asses.

You would think that my experience in the pancake house would have taught me a lesson, but a few years later found me once again working as busboy. And although the job was nearly as grueling it took place at a lovely resort high in the Adirondack Mountains. I lived in a dorm with a hundred other college-age kids and though we worked hard we actually did ultimately manage to spend most of the summer “high in the Adirondack Mountains.” And for that and various other reasons this is the one of all my many summers that I remember the most fondly; and it wasn’t just because it was when Nixon resigned.

Oops, I forgot to mention that I once worked as an usher in a movie theater. I knew I had left out a pre-college job. I only remember two things about this place: One was that I could bring home all the free popcorn I could carry. The other memory is that of a very nice lady who was a manager. I forget what movie was playing at the time but when she heard that I hadn’t yet seen it she insisted that I sit in the theater and watch it with the paying customers. I felt a little self-conscious about this, seeing as how I was supposed to be working and all, but wasn’t that a lovely gesture on her part? So what does that make the total now for all my jobs? I figure it’s about 4,693 horrible experiences and one lovely gesture.

When I moved to California I got a job in a convenience store. Keep in mind I was at this point a college graduate, but hey, I had packed up and relocated to a place 3,000 miles from home and where I knew no one. So bite me. I recall the job paid $2.86 an hour, which was hot stuff because the minimum wage at the time was $2.35. And I’m shocked by how little impact that last statement has, due largely to the fact that today’s minimum wage isn’t really that much higher considering I held this job over thirty years ago! You know what? Hold on and I’m going online to calculate what that $2.35 is equivalent to in today’s dollars. (Insert “on hold” music here.) I’m back and just as I suspected today’s minimum wage would have to be raised to $8.06 to equal that of the 1976 level. Shame on you people.

I quit the job in the convenience store after three months. I had bought a beat up old Ford Galaxy for $400 and thought after a full 90 days of work it was time to take some vacation time and see the state. And thus began my lifelong trend of quitting one job before securing another. And listen Kids, if you’re ever tempted to do this please take the advice of an older and more experienced person: go right ahead. Don’t worry about it and don’t look back. Jobs are like buses (and women.) There’s sure to be another one along any minute.

And there was the time I was hired as a tour guide at the

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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER…

Who would have thought that simply writing about the seemingly endless parade of my dead-end jobs would have been so exhausting? I broke last night at 11:00 as usual to watch The Daily Show but found that after it ended I simply could not return to this article. I was drained. It seemed the more I wrote about the next job on my list the more I remembered others. I felt as if I were trapped in some putrid 1950’s science fiction film and my former jobs were llike alien creatures breeding out of control!

And so now I’m going to end this with a mad dash to the finish. I am going to tell you about the rest of my jobs (or at least the ones I can recall at this moment) by using the literary equivalent of a stake through the heart. I’m going to end this agony by ripping off the band-aid that covers the open wound that is my employment history with one hard, quick pull. It won’t be pretty, but if you’re still up for it I promise you it will be swift. And so with a lung-filling breath in…hold it… and a slow, steady exhale, we begin the end:

I was hired to write for a soft-core porn magazine named Fling. It featured only women with outsized breasts. I was given a picture of a naked woman and had to make up a story about her. She was a maid. She was English. She was a twin. Whatever. The commute to this job was an hour each way, which was acceptable. The editor was a maniac, which was not. I lasted three days.

I worked as a stockbroker for six years. I didn’t really know it was a sales job when I began to pursue it. I was not particularly successful at it, although most people last less than two years. It’s a dirty job and to this day I still occasionally feel the urge to scrub myself clean with a wire brush like some sort of financial Lady Macbeth.

I worked in the patio furniture section of a local department store when I was a teenager. I hated that job too. One day I was caught (not that I was trying to hide it) reading a Mad Magazine while walking the display floor. The management guy who busted me was outraged. “Customers in the department and he’s walking around reading a comic book!” he sputtered. This manager was later fired and subsequently arrested for stealing big-ticket items from the store.

I was gang-hired by Sears to be a teacher for their driving school. Those of you who have driven with me probably got a laugh out of that. Basically everybody who applied and could speak, write and had a driver’s license got hired. We were then sent to L.A. for training. On the first day of class the bitch in charge told me to shave my beard. I pointed out that we weren’t teachers yet, and in fact weren’t even being paid. She warned me not to come in again with a beard. I caved and came in freshly shaven the next day. She looked at me with such an expression of self-satisfied smugness that I wanted to wipe it off her face with a shovel. I quit the next day. The beard grew back.

I was unemployed and blissfully asleep when the girl I lived with woke me up at midnight to tell me I was now working with her. She baked bread at a health food store in the wee hours and one of the other bakers had just quit. And I was now hired. So get dressed. How I let her push me into this I don’t know. I lasted several weeks baking bread, and of course it was miserable. I can still remember the feeling of coming home each morning at around six a.m. and painfully attempting to pull the dried dough from the hairs on my arms. I'm not even sure we ever got any free bread.

I was once hired by the Social Security Administration to assist in a hospital survey. My job was to visit various nurse stations throughout the day and ask a few questions about the number and nature of the patients the doctor had seen that day. I got to talk to, and flirt with, a lot of cute nurses, including one who is, thirty years later, still a good friend. I also became friends with another fellow hired for the survey and I often amused him by pointing out two or three old people using walkers to slowly cross the hospital lobby and then announcing it as if it were a horse race. “Here’s comes Withered Grandma and it looks like she’s opening up a big lead, but wait, Old Man in Stained Robe is picking up some ground…” I was hilarious, if I do say so myself, but unfortunately the job was a temporary position (And really, aren’t they all?) In addition, my new friend ended up sleeping with my live-in girlfriend and so I lost my job, my friend and my girl all at the same time. It was, indeed, the perfect storm.

I worked in an adult bookstore, although it frightens me that I can no longer remember if it was for two or four years. Golly, I hope it wasn’t four. I liked this job because it asked nothing of me except to show up. I’d come in at four, make some coffee, watch the Rockford Files, read a book and occasionally hand out quarters to the sweaty-palmed pervs who frequented the peep booths in the back room. And then one day I had an epiphany when I realized that I was a college graduate who was now inserting batteries into one of our products in order to demonstrate to a couple of Arab boys exactly how the giant vibrating thumb worked. This event, plus the fact that I had been held up at gunpoint four times, gently hinted to me that it might once again be time to move on.

And move on I did, and soon found a job as a night clerk in a motel. Again it was a rather simple job and it was within walking distance from my home, which was a nice perk since I didn’t own a car or even a bicycle. I met a couple of minor celebrities during this gig, including old-timey actor Gordon MacRae and either Sam or Dave from Sam & Dave. I also checked in a young member of the comedic Marx family, but when I saw the credit card and commented on the name the stuffy punk said stiffly, “We don’t discuss the family business.” Clearly the famous Marx sense of humor must have died with the Groucho generation.

I also once checked in a group of four or five young men and women. I flirted with one of the girls as I ran their credit card and could swear she was flirting back. Three hours later I was pointing her out to the police. It seems this gang, including my latest crush, had relieved some old ladies of their purses and had checked into the motel using a stolen credit card. Ah, the course of love never runs smoothly.

I was hired as a proofreader for a tariff publishing company. Looking back now it amazes me now how this task was accomplished in the days before computers. I was not just a proofreader but, perhaps for the only time, a supervisor as well. I was in charge of the three or four women who spent their day typing out the long columns of numbers that made up a tariff page. I had to then check the numbers for mistakes, mistakes that were corrected with a combination of White-Out and re-typing. When I thought the pages were perfect I would then mail them for filing to a government agency in Washington D.C. Where some shlub on the other end would also proofread them and, if there was a mistake, mail them back. To my boss Fat Bob, who would scream and yell and carry on at me as if I had just burned down his barn. I worked there for a year, bedded one of the typists, could have bedded another, and was laid off by Fat Bob the week before Christmas. Which made me so happy that I still recall literally skipping to the bank on my way to depositing my final paycheck.

During another holiday season years earlier my dad worked a side job selling Christmas trees on a corner lot in an attempt to continue to feed his wife and three ungrateful Baby Huey’s. One night I went along to work for tips. I spent four hours dragging a great many heavy, sticky trees to be loaded onto customer’s cars on that icy winter night, and when it was finally time to get in my dad’s car and head home I didn’t need to do any fancy calculating to know that I had earned a grand total of twenty-five cents. Or as I like to think of it, six-and-a-quarter cents an hour. It was an early lesson about the supposed value of hard work, and I never forgot it.

I have been a tour guide not once, not twice but thrice over the course of my storied career. The first time was as a volunteer college student showing off the campus to prospective freshman. Although I made no money I did this either because I was bursting with school spirit or because I wanted to meet a lot of eighteen-year-old chicks. Take your best guess.

Then I was a tour guide at the famous San Diego Wild Animal Park. Yup, I drove the tram and everything. It was a wonderful job, but once again I was forced to shave my beard. For some reason (OK, we know the reason—I’m a pain in the ass.) I kept a little patch of hair growing beneath my lower lip, which did not go unnoticed by my boss. “And I see that patch of hair you have growing beneath your lip!” he growled. I guess he took it as sort of a hirsute “fuck you” aimed directly at him. He was a very perceptive man. So perceptive, in fact, that he passed on hiring me back the next summer after the seasonal lay-off.

And finally I was a tour guide for a third (and hopefully final) time at the also-famous Winchester Mystery House. Keep in mind I worked here for four dollars an hour after I had already been a semi-successful stockbroker. My theory was it was a good training ground to practice public speaking. I thought this might be helpful as I was beginning to host some local cable TV shows. Still, I’ll never forget my wife’s face the first day I came home wearing the official tour guide uniform. It was a red and white striped shirt with a black bowtie, and as I remember it she struggled quite courageously but ultimately without success to keep a straight face. I was nearly forty.

Back in San Diego I once worked delivering those flyers that you see hanging on people’s doors. I figured what the hell, I would get money and exercise at the same time. Which I did, but unfortunately it turned out to be quite a lot of one and precious little of the other. I lasted about two weeks.

Every time I finish writing a paragraph I lean back and within thirty seconds another pathetic job rises from the slimy, bubbling bog of my memory. As I wrote that last sentence two more jobs, one writing a humor column for a New-Age newspaper and the other as a feature writer for an entertainment magazine that was never published, came to mind. The one thing these jobs had in common is that I never saw a penny from either. (Although I did see a byline from one, which at the time felt better than cash. OK, no it didn’t.)

Logically, it’s impossible that my list of jobs is limitless. There must be an end here somewhere, but I’m not going to pursue this any further in the hopes of finding some theoretical bottom that may or may not exist. I have no doubt that the minute I finish this article another one, or three or five more jobs that I’ve somehow overlooked will come roaring at me from the distant past, a past where they should have remained; buried and forgotten.

That’s OK—that’s enough of this, I think you get the point. I told you at the outset that this would be a long and winding road and it has been that. But now I am tired, emotionally drained and have to get some rest. After all, I promised myself that I would get up early tomorrow morning. It’s time once again to update my resume.

Career Week: Collections

Here’s a toughie for you: How does a shy, mild mannered, live and let live kind of fellow like yours truly find himself employed by the Ford Motor Credit Company in the collections department? Hey, don’t look to me for an answer. Frankly, all of my career choices have me baffled. Why the hell do you think I’m asking you?

But there I was working as an ACAR (Assistant Customer Accounts Rep) for Ford. And I even stayed there long enough to be promoted to the CAR position. Yes, it was strange when people asked me what I did at Ford and I had to admit I was a CAR. And if you think that the folks at Ford came up with these assignations because they had a bit of a sense of humor, well, you’d be wrong.

I’ll give you a brief description of this latest in my long line of miserable ways to make a living, but then I’m going to follow up by revealing my most successful technique. I do this just in case you ever find yourself employed in a position where you try to squeeze money out of deadbeats.

Basically we worked in two-man teams. And yes, one or both of these men could be a woman. Jesus, it’s exhausting trying to stay correct these days. The ACAR was responsible for calling people who were up to sixty days late on their car payment. After an account became sixty days delinquent it was handed over to the CAR for resolution.

There were several ways to resolve a delinquent client. The preferred method, of course, was to get the loser to make the payments according to the contract he had signed. But there were tools to help you during those times when things got a little tight. After all, we people at Ford had a heart. We weren’t monsters, you know.

One method was to allow the customer to skip one, two or occasionally even three payments in order to catch up and get back on track. (And then usually fall behind again six months later as he vainly tried to pay for a car or truck he clearly couldn’t afford and shouldn’t have been allowed to finance in the first place.)

Now, of course in reality you simply couldn’t skip your car payment. I mean, this was Ford—they were in the business of making money. (Remember this was back in the day when they actually did make money! Ha!) So if you wanted to skip a payment or three you simply had to pay the interest for the month or so. Now, if you were down to your final few payments the interest was minimal and could almost be next to nothing.

But if you were at the beginning of, say, a sixty-month contract you might find yourself paying the equivalent of a full car payment just in interest in order to skip two payments, payments that would be moved to the end of your contract. And before you start throwing stones at this cold, cruel corporate establishment remember nobody put a gun to your head and made you buy a new Mustang GT. (See, I did have at least a bit of the right attitude!)

The final way to settle a delinquent account, of course, was to actually repossess the car. There was a service that we used for this purpose, but on occasion one of my co-workers would cut a key in the office and go out and grab the car himself. I never did this, however. That doesn’t really surprise you, does it? I remember one particular Monday when Jim came back to the office yelling, “I got it! I got it!” He had repossessed a car over the weekend and he was getting high fives all around. I couldn’t possibly imagine myself feeling the slightest bit of pride after doing such a thing, and of course I felt sorry for the person who lost his car besides. So how many jobs is that now for which I was completely and utterly ill suited? I’ve lost count.

OK, here’s my technique, and you’ll be happy to know that it starts with a racy little story that took place on the grass in my backyard one balmy summer night. And no, I’m afraid I’m not going to be sharing the juicy details; I don’t need my mother yelling at me about this website again.

We open on a warm, humid night and the woman I am seeing and I are in the backyard on the grass. And as we are lustily and sweatily rolling around on the lawn—Let’s see, how can I put this?—something happens that has never happened to me in any lovemaking session, before or since. Something wonderful. Something, uh, simultaneous. OK, that’s enough of that.

OK, so it must have been pretty emotional, because as I walked this woman to her car she tells me that she’s decided that we can no longer see each other. I think the depth of the feeling must have had a profound effect on both of us. Why in the world would this cause her to want to break up with me, you wonder? Did I mention that she was married? (Just a little joke Mom--poetic license to make the story more interesting and all that. Heh-heh.)

I stood in front of my house and watched her drive away. And then I continued to stand there, nearly motionless, for over an hour. But she never came back. That night was a mostly sleepless one for me, a situation that was not helped by the longest, loudest thunder and lightning storm I’ve ever seen in the Bay Area. It had been a surreal evening all around.

The next day I go to work (What am I going to do—stay home and weep like some schoolgirl? Men don’t cry—we have heart attacks.) but I’m in the foulest of moods. The clouds had cleared from the night before; all except the black one that continued to follow me right to my desk.

It was in this ugly mood that I got on the phones and started to call my list of deadbeats about their delinquent car payments. I was a CAR at this point, and had some pretty tough nuts to crack. One of them was some guy I had been skip-tracing. That means I was trying to locate his sorry ass. Finally I managed to track down his mother (Why do you think they ask you for all that information on your credit application, Dumbo?) who insisted that she didn’t know where her son was.

I tried everything on this old lady. I told her we were trying to help her son; we wanted him to keep his car and bring his payments up to date. And if she would only tell me where he was we could work this all out. But the mother was as protective as a bear with her cub. (Despite the fact that her “cub” was 45 years old and a loser.) Finally in my foul mood I couldn’t take anymore. “I’m glad my mother doesn’t act like that,” I spat into the phone and hung up.

A short time later I picked up the phone and I heard the words that I still remember verbatim: “I think I made a mistake.” Yes, my girlfriend had been suffering as much as I and after cooing a few sloppy words to each other we were officially back together.

My heart soared, the cloud over my head dissipated and the sun shone everywhere as the birdies sang. And we would stay happily together for several more months, until the time she found out that I had been attempting to recreate that backyard magic with a close friend of hers. (It’s just poetic license, Ma. Stop reading!)

But for a while after I hung up the phone I was as happy as I’ve ever been. For who among us can judge what form true love will take when it finally arrives? Well, maybe her husband could, but still…And then the phone rang again.

“Ford Motor Credit!” I answered in my most chirpy voice of the day. Hell, of the year.
“What did you say to my mother?”

Uh-oh. And for the next fifteen minutes or more I had to listen to this maniac scream at me. He didn’t want to discuss his delinquent payments, the odd weather or the current political situations. He simply wanted to verbally ream the bastard who had dared to talk like that to his mother. And so he did.

And there’s a lesson here for those of you who are either currently working in collections or find yourself doing so sometime in the future. If you need to get one of your deadbeats on the phone in a quick hurry, you might want to try insulting his mom. I can’t promise that it will become an effective collection technique for you, but I can assure you that it has always worked for me.

Career Week: Paper Boy

Yeah, I know. A century or so ago a fourteen-year-old boy might find himself as a soldier in the midst of a bloody Civil War battle or underground for eighteen hours a day slaving away in a coal mine. Still, when I look back on it now, working as a paperboy in the late 1960’s seems to have been a pretty rough job. At least I’m fairly certain it’s not something I would want to do now.

First off, unlike any of the dozens of other horrible jobs that would eventually follow, being a paperboy was a six-days-a-week gig. And that’s only because Newsday didn’t have a Sunday edition, or else it would have been seven! (So at least I was always somewhat grateful that I didn’t deliver The Long Island Press.)

And newspaper delivery was also year ‘round. And in New York that meant even in the icy cold winter when there was snow on the ground. Yes, even when the roads were covered with snow or ice we had to ride our bicycles (or walk the route pulling sleds!) up to the newspaper office to wait for the newspaper delivery truck to arrive. The office, by the way, was about a mile away from home, not the shortest of commutes even on a sunny summer day. And that’s just where you had to get to in order to simply begin your route. (Usually after, after putting in a full day at school, I might add.) And we got to do all this for about five dollars a week.

OK, wah, wah, wah. So we were young and strong and stupid and didn’t know any better—the perfect stooges for the heartless publishing corporations that still bemoaned the Emancipation Proclamation. I didn’t really start this screed to whine about the horribly cruel working conditions faced by over-fed middle class white boys four decades ago. What I really wanted to review were the financial aspects of the job. Allow me to offer this knowledge as a public service, just in case you or someone you love happens to be considering a career in the newspaper home delivery field.

The first thing you should know is that it cost 30 cents to have Newsday delivered for a week. (That’s five cents a copy, for those of you who went to school in California.) At the end of each week it was up to the paperboy to “collect.” It was on this day that doing your route always took much longer, since not only did you have to deliver a paper to each of your forty-plus houses, but you had to knock on every door and request your money.

“Collect!” you would chirp as the person who had been receiving the paper all week opened the door. And it truly was a Gumpian experience: you never did know what you were going to get. If anything. The responses might range from being verbally berated for your technique (“Collect? Is that any way to ask for money?”) to the most feeble of excuses ("Uh, my wife isn’t home, can you come back next week?”)

The door might be answered by a drunk, a feeble old lady or, as it often was at one house on my route, by a young woman who always wore a see-through blouse which revealed a nearly see-though brassiere. Oh, looking back I suppose the newspaper delivery business wasn’t all bad.

But seriously, can you imagine asking a kid to come back later for thirty cents? Sure it was more money back then (hell, you could buy a pack of cigarettes for that) but come on, we had to pay for these newspapers every week. It’s like asking a fourteen-year-old kid to lend you thirty cents. Didn’t these people have any shame? (Of course the girl in the sheer blouse clearly didn’t, but for her I was willing to make an exception.)

I still remember my route number. It was 649. I don’t know why I remember it, but I know I saw it daily on the little green book that we all carried. I don’t remember what we called the book, but every carrier absolutely relied on it to run a successful business. Each customer’s name was listed in the green book, along with how much he owed and, perhaps most importantly, how much he tipped.

Not that the book had special column for tips, but each week every customer would have a 30 in the column next to his name. Right next to that would be the amount we received. For example one entry might be ENGLANDER 30 40. This would mean that on that particular week Mrs. Englander (And that is the actual name of one of the people on my route. I don’t remember the lady, but I always liked this most Anglo-sounding of names.) gave me a ten-cent tip.

The ten-cent tip was pretty much the standard of the day although it varied greatly, spanning from the rare and exalted twenty-five cent tip all the way down to the less-rare and nearly incomprehensible…nothing. But I don’t carry a grudge against the people who could not even scrape up a nickel for the poor freezing child who trudged to their house six days a week to personally hand deliver Long Island’s finest publication. After all, this was over forty years ago. I’m sure that by now most of these people are trapped in eternal agony, as they burn in that special circle of Hell reserved exclusively for cheap bastards. At least I heartily pray that they are. Amen.

One of the families that I delivered to never gave me a tip. They were Chinese, to which you might shout in outraged indignation, “What has that got to do with their tipping habits, Leonard? What are you implying?” To which I would answer, “Nothing at all--I’m simply trying to paint a picture here. So calm your p.c. asses down.”

Anyway this one family, who happened to be Chinese, would never give me a tip. I’m sure in my sixties liberal way I had excused them, assuming that tipping the poor, freezing child who trudged, etc. etc. was something not known in their culture. Or maybe they were too poor. And then one cold and snowy day in December it happened—a bona fide Christmas Miracle!

Most, but not all, of my customers would give me a Christmas tip. Usually it was a dollar; once in a while it was two. (Sidebar: Do you tip your mailman at Christmas? I don’t. Should I? I mean he fucks up the mail delivery quite a bit and so really doesn’t deserve a tip. And yet I can’t help but strongly suspect that if I did give him a tip my mail would get fucked up a lot less. It’s the “chicken or the egg” thing. Let me know what you think.) But on this particular Christmas I received the almost unheard of three-dollar tip! And yes, it was from that same Chinese family who I thought had been stiffing me all year.

Isn’t it peculiar how our perspective changes with time? Back then I was thrilled, of course, to receive the substantial tip. My mom saw it as a valuable lesson about judging people. Here I had them labeled as tightwads for an entire year and yet they turned out to have given me the most generous Christmas tip of all! And so, like my mom, I guess I also looked at the three-dollar tip as a valuable lesson learned. Unlike my mom however, I also looked at all the things I could buy with those three bucks. (Remember, back then a candy bar only cost a nickel!)

But now, thanks to a potent combination of rudimentary mathematics and half a century of roiling cynicism, I see things a little differently. Please indulge me: Imagine cheap old Customer A has given me a lousy nickel tip each week. On top of that, the skinflint didn’t even have the decency to give me a Christmas tip. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Do the math and you’ll find that Customer A gave me a total of $2.60 in tips over the course of the year. If Customer B, however, gave me the average dime tip each week, plus the average one dollar at Christmas, that’s a total of $6.20 in tips for the year. That’s more than double the three-dollar tip given to me by the Miracle Chinese Family, and that’s just from my average customer. And even if the man who gave me a twenty-five cent tip each week gave me nothing for Christmas, his yearly tips would amount to a whopping thirteen dollars!

And so where does this Chinese family get off trying to steal a year’s worth of credit for generosity with one power play at the end of the game? The numbers simply aren’t there! Divide their supposedly generous three-dollar tip over the course of a year and it comes to less than a measly six cents a week!

And so as of this moment I am deleting these frauds from my memory banks. They no longer will reside in my brain as shining examples of the giving spirit of Christmas, and will be immediately replaced by the guy who gave me a quarter tip each and every week. No, better yet they will be replaced by the girl who not only gave me a tip, but did so each week with a friendly smile and while wearing a see-through blouse. Now here was a truly generous soul who clearly understood all about fourteen-year-old boys and the true spirit of giving!

Career Week-Music Store Clerk

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Hey, I liked listening to records! Hey, I know three chords on my guitar! Hey, I need a job! Why don’t I work in a music store? And before I could say “pianissimo forte” I did.

And it was a nice music store too. It was family-owned; I don’t remember the name of the family or of the store, although I know they were the same. Waldman’s? Windmere’s? It was something like that.

The store was basically one giant showroom and you could pretty much buy anything from a clarinet reed to a grand piano. Well, maybe not a grand piano, but a pretty good one. And of course there were many employees from all races, creeds and age groups. The only thing that they had in common was that they all seemed to possess more musical ability than I.

I must have worked for the store during August or September and possibly for a little bit of both, although we can be fairly certain that my stretch there covered less than two full months. What else was new? The store at that time of year was fairly busy as this was when the kiddies went back to school. And so each day the store was filled with nerdy little future geeks (and perhaps an occasional future rock star?) who needed to rent band instruments. In fact I believe that is why I was hired—to fill out the staff for the booming band rental season.

I have almost no recollection of my time at this place, despite having spent eight hours a day there for what must surely have been at least several weeks. I do remember that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours had just been released, so I would be able to pinpoint the year for you if I felt like looking it up, which I don’t.

I do remember that the store had a strong sense of community involvement. Some might say that it was their way of giving back. I would say it was a way to ensure future band rentals from the neighborhood brats.

In keeping with that delightful community involvement the store occasionally conducted tours for groups of ten or fifteen grade-school children. On this particular day we were told that about a dozen third-graders would be coming in. For some of my fellow employees this news meant only one thing: It’s Showtime!

One of the more twinkly members (I don’t want to say he was gay because I don’t know that for a fact. And besides, gay didn’t even exist back then.) of our department could barely contain his excitement. He decided that when the kids arrived we would each do a little demonstration of a particular exotic instrument. Someone would play the steel drum while somebody else thumbed out a short tune on a kalimba. Suddenly Twinkles turned to me, handed me a small xylophone and said, “Here, you can play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on this!”

I can? Well, I practiced for the hour before the little monsters arrived and when it came time for my command performance I got most of it right. The kids never noticed that I messed up, but I’m sure my musically gifted co-workers did. I’m also sure that at this point I didn’t give a damn. For here I was, 24 years old with a degree in psychology, playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star for a bunch on snot-nosed eight-year olds. And poorly. I’m sure that over the course of my life I have found myself in more ridiculous situations, but right now none are coming to mind.

It was not at that exact moment that I decided to quit my job, but I strongly suspect it’s when those particular gears began to turn inside my head. And once they are set in motion I find that it’s only a short time until they begin to spin like turbines.

Two weeks later and it’s a regular day at the music store. The band rental season is waning and there are no tour groups scheduled to humiliate me. Suddenly the ordinariness of the afternoon is broken, and again it was by Twinkles. He fairly skipped into our department, his merry bright eyes filled with excitement. We just knew he had some big announcement.

“Guess what, everybody? The sheet music to You Light Up My Life is here!” And when the excitement began to spread to my co-workers I knew that I had once again voluntarily deposited myself into the midst of a pack of lunatics and called it a job. I kept the smile frozen on my face for as long as I could, in a vain attempt to show that I too was a team player sharing in this joyous news.

A short time later, after the initial exuberance had died a bit, Twinkles came up with what he must have thought was a marvelously delightful idea. “Hey, Everybody, why don’t we all stay after the store closes and sing You Light Up My Life around the piano!”

I’ll never know if that particular hootenanny actually occurred. I do know that if it did I wasn’t there. You see, I had to rush home that evening, have a quick bite to eat and then purchase a newspaper. It was clearly time once again to start reading the Help Wanted ads.

Career Week: Store Detective

In my telephone discussions with Mr. Zero he often wonders how I managed during my lifetime, despite having earned a college degree, to have held some of the lamest, lower-level jobs imaginable. My employment history, as you are learning this week, has truly taken a long and winding road; a road that has admittedly passed through more dirty ditches and dank tunnels than over shiny majestic bridges. And my answer for Mr. Zero is the same I’ll offer to you tonight: I simply don’t know.

For example, the very first job I landed out of college, ink still wet on my Bachelor of Arts diploma, was as an undercover detective for a large Long Island department store. Correction: that’s not entirely true. Actually the first job was as a glorified security guard for this store. It was a few months later that I was promoted to store detective. Correction again: there was really nothing particularly glorified about the security guard position.

Here’s what I remember: I had to wear a jacket and tie, I had to stand on my feet all day and my post was at a doorway in the receiving area of the store. Christ, that sounds horrible now that I’m typing it out. Oh yeah, and the pay was miserable too.

Not that I recall, but I suspect my job had something to do with checking the items that customers picked up. In other words if they showed me a receipt for a patio lounge chair I shouldn’t let them leave with a motorboat. The job was painfully simple and, except for occasionally getting to eyeball the wildly-endowed young blonde woman who worked in receiving, mind-numbingly boring.

OK, figure I had been doing that job for two months when I applied for and was accepted as an undercover store detective. These are the folks who spend their day wandering around the store trying to catch people stealing stuff. And once again you find me in a job for which I couldn’t possibly have been less suited.

I hate stealing. I hate dishonesty. When I was a kid a group of about five of us parked our bikes outside the local 5 & 10 and I suddenly realized that the other four were going in to steal water pistols. “I’m not going.” I said. And no, it wasn’t because I was afraid. It was because it was wrong. “Do you want us to get one for you?” one of the kids asked. I told him no I did not, although even now I look back and think that this was quite a thoughtful gesture; especially as it was coming from a thief and all.

The problem is I don’t care if other people steal. I won’t do it, but I never had a burning desire to stop other people from doing it. Which is unfortunate, because that was basically the description of my brand new job.

I and the other chap who had been hired were first required to train for the position. This included my spending time with the experienced detectives as well as wandering around on my own becoming familiar with the store. And following people. I wasn’t allowed to apprehend anybody until I had been made a full detective, but it was good practice. And of course if I ever did see anything suspicious I was to call one of the official store detectives.

One of those other detectives was beer-bellied cop wanna-be named Steve. He was a bit of a blowhard but also a friendly sort who was quick with his laugh. I remember he had a rule that he would never date a fellow employee. He finally broke this rule when he started seeing this attractive blonde babe from housewares. I suspected then, and still do, that the reason he violated his ironclad dating rule was because this was the first woman, inside or outside the store, who had ever said yes to him.

One day I was teamed with Steve when he decided to take me to a place that I had only heard rumors about. We stood outside a door I had never seen open, and with a furtive look over his shoulder Steve unlocked the latch and we went inside. Behind another door we entered a completely dark room with black painted walls and no furniture except a folding chair. Steve lowered his not insignificant bulk into the chair and indicated that I should sit on the floor. And that I should be very quiet.

I looked at the wall we were facing and realized that the rumors had been true. On three sides of me stood regular black walls, but directly in front there was a large, darkly tinted window. On the other side of the window was another small, although brightly lit room. Yes, I realized, the stories were true. Steve and I were staring through a two-way mirror and looking directly into the one of the store’s dressing rooms.

Now I knew that it was the men’s dressing room, but it still didn’t feel right. I also knew that women sometimes used the men’s dressing room and that really didn’t feel right. Exciting, yes, but not right. Steve had whispered that sometimes he sat back here for an entire day, armed with soda and snacks, and nabbed three, four, even five people trying to abscond with the store’s precious goods. Oh well, then I guess that made two-way mirror morally acceptable. I couldn’t imagine that Steve would use it simply as his own private voyeur peep show. Ahem.

We only stayed for about an hour, during which time two, maybe three, people came in to try on clothes. One was a wise-ass little black kid who instinctively knew he was being watched, although he wasn’t exactly sure from where. When he left he turned to address each of the three non-door walls, saying “Bye! Bye! Bye!”

The other person I remember using the room was an attractive chubby girl of about eighteen. She apparently had no idea that she was being observed as she tried on a pair of jeans. At one point she stood in her panties for a few seconds and lifted her shirt a bit to observe her stomach. For one shining moment I could see the lower third of her ample and brassiered breasts. Was seeing this provocative display really that big a deal for a 22-year-old male with gallons of hormones raging through his system? Hey, I’m still writing about it, aren’t I?

About a week later a story broke in Newsday that the department store had been using a two-way mirror in their dressing rooms. I still have the article somewhere. I can even remember the mildly clever title: Two Way Mirror Gives Them Fits!

I spent about an hour that same day standing guard outside the sinister door while a couple of construction guys removed the offending piece of glass and boarded up the sinister room. And how I ended up being the guy overseeing this clandestine operation rather than the guy writing the witty article in the newspaper is a mystery that I’ll leave for you and Mr. Zero to unravel.

The head of security was not particularly impressed with the progress being made by me and the other detective-trainee, but after about a month he reluctantly awarded us our badges. Now there’s one of the most incongruous combinations that this sorry planet has ever witnessed: me with a badge.

I was happy to finally become a full-fledged detective however. During the time of my training I and my friend Lenny had been planning our move to California and I had been waiting for this moment in order to give my two-week notice; which I did the very next day, to the less-than-amused sigh of the head of security.

No, I never did catch anybody trying to steal anything, and I’ll never know if I would have challenged him if I had. I never did particularly like creating a scene, you know. And two weeks after I received my badge (it was a rather impressive sparkling gold number that looked almost like the real thing) I said farewell to another batch of coworkers and scratched another chalk line on that jobs tally blackboard inside my head. Another week had passed when I crossed the border into California, armed with my college degree and my future. And a big box of chalk.

Career Week: Advertising Salesman

Once again we’re in San Diego and I’m out of work when my girlfriend and I drove up to visit her parents, who lived in some long-forgotten suburb of Los Angeles. Her folks were very nice people who I suspect liked me more than their daughter did, which oddly enough has not been a particularly rare occurrence in my love life.

My girlfriend’s dad was a pleasant fellow, and a professional salesman by trade. He was one of those people who always had some kind of deal cooking, sort of like a shorter, gray-haired version of Ralph Kramden. He never did hit it big, or at least he hadn’t during the time I knew him, but somehow he managed to provide a comfortable life for himself, his wife and their five children.

His latest project was a publication that would feature ads for various types of businesses. In it you could find a plumber or a bookstore or a restaurant--whatever you were looking for. Yes I know, they already have a publication like that. It’s called the phone book.

But this book was supposed to be different. “We’re going to limit the amount of advertising in each type of business to no more than five,” he explained to me as we sat at the kitchen table. “Exclusivity, that’s the key!” Well, sure, what the hell did I know? And once again I found myself accepting a job for which I was not qualified, had no aptitude and didn’t particularly enjoy. But at least I’d make a lot of money. After all, my girlfriend’s father had told me I would.

I was to be the sales representative for the San Diego area. What this meant was that I would knock on the doors of various businesses and try to get the owners to spring for an ad. I think you could buy a quarter, half or full page of the publication.

I hate selling and I hate barging into businesses to introduce myself to strangers. So you can pretty much guess how this little adventure turned out. I doubt that I even put in forty hours a week, but I did give the venture my usual half-assed shot. And no matter where I went, no matter what type of business I visited, I always came away with nothing. Each day I’d return home (knowing me, probably by noon) and my girlfriend would ask, “Did you sell anything?” And of course I hadn’t.

This story tonight is less of a comedy and yet not quite a tragedy. What it is, if fact, is a mystery, a mystery I have yet to solve and on which I would actually appreciate your theories and insights. OK, I wouldn’t appreciate it at all, but feel free to have some fun with it anyway.

One hot San Diego day, near the end of my ad sales career, I walked into yet another office and did my spiel for yet another stranger. This time it was for a woman. I recall that she was quite attractive (for an older woman) but also one who radiated success. She was well-dressed, well-spoken and obviously knew what she was doing. She had it going on, as the kids say. (That is what the kids say, isn’t it?)

I’m not easily shocked these days, but I also like to believe that I was not easily shocked back then either. And yet when I finished my speech about what a great advertising opportunity this new publication would be for the right company and the woman said, “Fine, I’ll take a quarter page,” I was stunned.

When she pulled out a checkbook and wrote a check I couldn’t believe it was happening. If I remember correctly, and I don’t, I believe the amount was about eighty dollars. I had sold an ad! But the thoughts in my head were not about my success or all the future ads I would now sell. All I was thinking was, “Why is she doing this?” I didn’t have the answer then and I don’t have it now. I only have theories; three of them:

Theory #1
Despite her professional demeanor this woman didn’t have a clue as to how the business world works. How could she think that buying advertising in a publication that she had never heard of from some confused hippie kid was going to help her business? Perhaps she didn’t even run this business at all. Perhaps her husband had gone out to lunch and she had decided to sit in his chair to see what it felt like.

Theory #2
Maybe this lady was every bit the seasoned and astute professional woman that she appeared to be and, despite my bumbling sales technique, she saw an opportunity to take a chance on some inexpensive advertising that would be paid for even if only one person who saw it came to her business. She might have seen a potential great reward for relatively little risk and decided to give it a try.

Theory #3
Is it even remotely possible that this woman bought an ad from me as an act of kindness? Is it conceivable that she was so perceptive and so clever that from the second I walked into her office she had me pegged as a nice guy and an inept salesman? Did this woman spend eighty dollars of her own money just to be…nice? This theory has nagged at me since I walked out of her office, check clutched in sweaty hand, over thirty years ago. And if it’s true that this woman bought a quarter-page ad in some crappy publication just to be benevolent to some struggling young doofus of a salesman, well, that really was quite a gesture, wasn’t it?

So what’s your theory?

Career Week: Male Escort

Hey Kids, did I ever tell you about the time I was hired as a male escort? Well climb up here on Grandpa’s knee and I’ll amuse you with a tale that happened a long time ago. God dammit, I told you to wash your hands first! Get the hell off me!

It’s true indeed that I was once hired as a male escort. I don’t know why I have to use the word “male” in there. I mean, what other kind of escort could I be? (I’ll pause here for a few minutes so you can get those sarcastic replies out of your system.)

Done? Now as tantalizing as the topic of this column may sound, and no matter what you think of me or my previous writing, there is one thing that I can guarantee you about this story: You will be disappointed in the ending.

This happened many years ago when I lived in San Diego. I was reading the help wanted ads, which is basically what passed for job hunting in those days, when I saw a heading that read MALE ESCORTS WANTED. I called immediately and discovered that yes, they were a legitimate business and they were looking for a few young men to escort women to social events. Hey, I was a young man, and it sure sounded better than a lot of my previous employment ventures. I figured that as long as I didn’t have to pump gas or scrape half-eaten pancakes off dirty dishes, count me in!

I set up an interview and two days (like I actually remember how many days it was) later I met with the lady who headed the company. We met in a new, unfurnished office, and it became obvious that she was just starting this business. She sat at her desk and I set in a plastic folding chair, the only other piece of furniture in the room.

She was a pudgy lady of about forty, and like so many people I have met since, was convinced that monumental success awaited her and her brilliant new company. For myself I felt a little out of place. I had dressed nicely for the occasion, although I’m sure if I could post a picture now of what I was wearing it would provide a lovely chuckle for you all.

But I was also at the peak of my hippie-look period, with my hair being the longest that it has ever been. And if you don’t know me and are imagining the flowing locks of say a Fabio, allow me to get that idea out of your noggin right now. Think more along the lines of a Larry Fine and you’ll be closer to getting the picture.

Actually it was the pudgy lady who got the picture. I had brought a snapshot of my fuzzy-headed self which she soon paper clipped to a folder that she had created just for me. And then she said the words that surprised me and that I will never forget: “You’re exactly the type we’re looking for.” I was shocked, and I don’t think it was all due to low-esteem. I just couldn’t believe this lady intended to build her brand new high-class escort service on a foundation made up of slightly over-weight, hirsute dopers who drove junky cars, couldn’t dance and dressed worse than Neil Young. Ah well, maybe I didn’t see the big picture.

After the compliment the nice lady explained the job. It was indeed a legitimate business that she hoped would provide male escorts for women of a certain age (and, I assumed, financial status) who might need a companion for an occasional dinner or other social engagement. And she emphasized that this was all the escort was to provide. Near the end of her job description she leaned forward and looked me straight in the eye.

“I’m telling you right now that some of these women will come on to you. When that happens I want you to come directly to me, and we will never again allow that woman to be a client,” she told me.

I, to my credit, managed to maintain a straight face. Remember, I was about twenty-five years old. I can’t speak for other twenty-five year olds—hell, yes I can. There are almost no twenty-five year old men on the planet who, when approached by an attractive older woman, are going to go running to the boss and squeal. And the few that do exist are not about to be turned on by a woman of any age, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

“Of course,” I replied. “I’ll come right to you.” Hey, I knew that I first had to get hired before I could have any of those rich over-sexed older women paying my rent and ripping off my clothes. And get hired I did—right on the spot. I shook the pudgy woman’s hand and went home to wait for her to call me with my first client.

And that was it. The call never came and in truth I was kind of relieved that it didn’t. I had already come to the conclusion that the whole thing was rather weird and that I was probably not cut out to be a paid companion anyway.

I told you you’d be disappointed in the ending.

Career Week: Umpire

You had to be at least sixteen years old to be a Little League umpire, and both Arthur and I were. In fact we were exactly sixteen, and so we found ourselves attending a meeting in the basement of some stranger’s house. One short hour later, along with all the old (30’s and 40’s) men in the room, we officially became umpires. Presto change-o, just like that.

Right off the bat (ha!) there were two problems that even my undeveloped sixteen-year-old brain could foresee. First, the pay was horrible. Yes, even for way back then. For umpiring an entire game I would receive the princely sum of two dollars. The amount, however, skyrocketed to three dollars if I was the plate umpire. And yes, despite this evidence to the contrary, there were both minimum wage and child labor laws back then. They just weren’t fanatical about them.

The second problem was that Arthur and I would be umping games where the players were our own age. Now if we were sixteen and the players on the field were, say, seven year old squirts, well then that might have been a workable situation. But imagine me as an umpire behind the plate when six-foot two, 220 pound Tom Sabalini, who I saw in the school hallway every single day, is up at bat. Do you think I’m going to risk permanent injury to my spine or other delicate body parts by calling this gargantuan out on strikes? For three bucks?

I don’t know how many games I actually worked as an umpire. My best guess would be three, possibly four. Certainly no more than that. And I do not remember the first game that I umpired. Nor do I remember the second. In fact I don’t recall a single moment of any game I called. Except for the last one. I do remember that one. Oh yes, I remember that one very well.

Mostly I remember the opposing coaches. One was a wiry, grizzled guy who wore a battered baseball cap on his head and about three days of growth on his face. He looked like a coach, and an old-school one at that. The other was a short, overweight sausage of a man with black hair combed straight back like Ratso Rizzo. He looked less like a baseball coach and more like Lou Costello. His team, incidentally, had yet to win a game.

Normally when the league scheduled umpires they would pair one experienced (old) guy with one of us young punks. For some reason on this particular day the only two umpires were Arthur and myself. I guess they figured that we were now experienced—having umpired two games each without actually collapsing into sobbing heaps in the middle of the game.

They only played seven inning games in Little League (Oh, so now that two bucks is starting to look more attractive, eh?) and on this particular day through some unexplained miracle Costello’s team found themselves leading after six innings. It must have been early spring, because it was getting dark. And so of course the fat coach waddled over and began conferring with us about whether it might be too dark to play the final inning.

“Well, it’s your call,” this sleaze-ball said with affected respect. “It’s getting pretty dark though. I don’t know if we’ll be able to see the ball for another inning.”

Of course I know now that this bastard handled us like putty. Here was this forty-year-old shameless hunk of blubber coercing two inexperienced kids into calling the game an inning early just so his crappy team would finally win a game.

Which of course we did. The coach on the other team, as you might expect, was apoplectic. Mr. Dietz (we would soon learn his name) came running over, screaming and carrying on. The fat coach just stood there and smirked. He knew his team had won. After all, an official, irreversible decision had been rendered by the umpires--the game was over.

Ah, I still remember Arthur and I walking across the green grass on this beautiful spring evening, away from the chaos that we had created on the field. Mr. Dietz had screamed at us at one point when we had unwisely gotten within ten yards of him.

“I’m going to report this! I’m going to protest this game!” he yelled.
“”And what’s your name?” I had asked politely, half as attempt to be professional and half with more than a trace of the smarmy sarcasm that only a sixteen-year-old can muster.
“DIETZ!” he bellowed back.

Yes, I’ve never forgotten that name. I also have never forgotten our next act. When Arthur and I had walked a good ways from the field we both stopped and turned back to face the two teams gathering up equipment in the fading light. We knew we had screwed up. And we knew, too, that we had been bullied.

Suddenly we both cheerfully waved our hands over our heads and yelled, “Good night, Everybody!” It was a defiant, rebellious act delivered, of course, from a safe distance. It was at that moment I knew that my remarkably short and painfully unprofitable career as a professional Little League umpire had suddenly and irrevocably come to an end. What I could not have known was that many other equally absurd and positively wretched employment opportunities still lay ahead.

Deth uv a Prezident

First, a little explanation. I saw the movie Death of a President today and wanted to discuss it with you for a bit. About a year back under the “Interests” section of My Profile I had posted a phrase as a joke. You know me, anything for a laugh.

I wasn’t laughing when I began to see my name coming up on the Internet with various warnings attached. I don’t know by whom, but my funny little phrase had been flagged. Call it paranoia if you want, people, but we are being watched.

And so tonight rather than risk having Cheney show up at my door to attach electrodes to my precious yarbles I was simply going to avoid using any combinations of words or phrases that might trigger another sinister visit from “them.” But instead I came up with the clever idea of misspelling any offending words in the hopes of slipping by that all-seeing electronic eye. (It’s a technique I had used on a website I wrote for years ago when I wanted to sneak an occasional foul word past their cyber-censor. And it had worked fukking great.)

The phrase that I had included in my profile as one of my “interests” was, by the way, “vialant ovarthro uv the U.S. governmint.” And it really was a joke. Vialant, me? I don’t even kill spiders, for goodness sake.

I had been looking forward to the movie Death of a President. And not for the reasons you might think. Regulars know that I take a back seat to no man in my burning hattred of Bush. People think I’m being hyperbolic when I state my belief that Bush should be tried and sent to prison for the rest of his life. I’m not. He’s a criminal, and deserves to be punished as such.

Yet I found I had mixed emotions about a film that portrays the murder of a living person. True, as a historic figure and a celebrity Bush should expect to give up some of the anonymity that we unknowns enjoy, but it all came down to the role reversal trick I use when faced with such moral dilemmas. That is, would I think it was OK if a movie was made in which I got murdered? Nope, I don’t think I’d like that at all, nor would I think it was right.

One comment I saw about the film was hilarious and yet reprehensible at the same time. Some character, when he had heard that there was a movie that depicted the assassanashun of Bush said, “I’m going to get a big jar of Vaseline and watch it over and over. This is going to be better than porn!”

Funny, yes, but wrong headed. Wouldn’t the celebration of even a fictitious assassanashun lower us to the level of the man we profess to hate? Don’t we condemn Bush because of the trail of thirty or one hundred or six hundred thousand corpses that leads directly to his front door? Can our answer to his atrocities possibly be more murder?

The point is there are those who are willing to kill for their beliefs, like al Qaeda, Saddam and Bush, and those of us who aren’t. Even those people who think it’s funny to attack a politician or a celebrity with a pie in the face are out of line. It’s a vialant, aggressive act, and certainly terrifying to the unsuspecting victim.

No, I wouldn’t call for the censoring of a film that shows the assassanashun of Bush, but nor would I applaud it. I would applaud it if it had been a good movie, but it wasn’t. Frankly I enjoy well-made “What if…” films and hope they make more. There was one on TV about a year back about an oil crisis that sent prices sky-rocketing. It too was a mockumentary but was extremely well done. (That is until the American-style ending, when everything went back to normal and the United States had learned its lesson about oil dependency and conservation. Yeah, that will happen.)

But Death of a President was nowhere in the same league as this TV movie. It spent most of its time showing fake testimonials by various characters and precious little time on the possible national and global implications of a Bush assassinashun. And half the time I was aware that I was just watching actors saying lines, and that never happens to me.

True, the film made the point that those currently in charge would rather jail an innocent man in order to maintain the myth that the attack was of an Islamic terrorist nature rather than arrest the guilty American veteran. But we already know that about this gang, don’t we?

And yet ultimately the film seals its own fate when it commits the most unforgivable cinematic crime of all. Death of a President is a colossal bore.

Freakishly Huge Naked Breasts!

Tonight’s episode will be short and sweet, I promise. It might even be a little fun, at least for me. You see, you have all been recruited, without your knowledge or permission, to take part in a little experiment.

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day (I won’t mention Mike by name so as not to embarrass him. Whoops.) and he told me that he generally reads my column only when he’s attracted by the title. And that’s fine. A writer can’t go around trying to force people to read his scribblings any more than an actor can force people to see his new movie. If people want to do something they will do it, and that’s the way it is and should be.

I joked last week because I had suddenly seen a jump in my daily hit count. I had gotten about 100 hits and I began, in a tongue-in-cheek way, to compare my sudden rise in popularity to Drudge, who gets 11 million hits a day. (And he doesn’t need to send out dopey little reminders either.)

OK, I’m just vamping here—filling space. I really have nothing more to say on the subject. I’m simply wondering how many of you would have read this far or even come to the site today if it had not been for that suggestive title up there.

So again, tonight’s experiment was for my personal research only. Once you’ve finished reading please fell free to return to your normal activities. And if you actually did happen to click on in the hopes of reading about, or even seeing, freakishly huge naked breasts—please accept my sincere apology.

This has been a test.