Shrimp Products

Off the project

2008-07-24T15:54:00.005-05:00

GREG
Did you get my work?

BOSS
Yes, I got it here. And I'm sorry but I'm taking you off the project.

GREG
What? I don't understand, I thought this was some of my best work.

BOSS
Greg, we can't air this. It's filthy.

GREG
Filthy? It's a cat food commercial, what could--

BOSS
This is one of the most reprehensible scripts I've ever seen.

GREG
What?

BOSS
This copy is just--"he scoops the Fancy Feast into a bowl. He traces the cat's body from the small of the back down the spine to the tail. The cat purrs sensuously."

GREG
What's wrong with that? It's a cat owner treating his pet to the finest luxury cat food on the market.

BOSS
At the bottom of page 16, he strokes the cat's tail, takes the tip of it into his mouth and closes his eyes. Which reminds me of another problem--this is a 30 second spot and you've written nearly seventy pages.

GREG
We can pare it down.

BOSS
But that's a relatively minor problem.

GREG
I'm afraid you're just going to have to come out and say it because I'm still not following you.

BOSS
Standards sent it back. They said it qualified as bestiality.

GREG
Bestiality?

BOSS
You're off the project, Greg. This work is just far too creepy.

GREG
But I just followed the product. It's a full-bodies, luxurious food, for owners who want to treat their cats to the best. It explodes with taste and opens the senses, and--

GREG absent-mindedly begins liking his hand and using it to wash his face. BOSS notices.

BOSS
What are you doing?

GREG
I'm--nothing. I'm doing nothing.

A breeze blows back BOSS's curtain. GREG sees the nest. He shows his teeth and hisses. GREG pounces across the desk and swats at BOSS, who jumps out the window and flaps off.

BOSS
CAW CAW!

Renegade

2008-07-19T20:53:00.002-05:00

AIDE
Welcome to Washington, Senator-Elect Guthrie, and congratulations.

GUTHRIE
Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

AIDE
I'll show you your new office in a second, but first, I'm sorry to tell you you're going to cut that ponytail.

GUTHRIE
What? No way!

AIDE
I'm sorry, it's the Senate dress code. No hair below the shoulders on a man.

GUTHRIE
Well you can forget it, old man! I don't need this job--this ponytail is who I am!

GUTHRIE voluntarily resigns and heads back to his home state where he becomes a gas station attendant for three weeks before he quits after his boss tries to make him clean up the bathroom.

I started a gang

2008-07-19T13:40:00.002-05:00

I started a gang the summer between eighth and ninth grades—neighborhood kids, mostly. It started out just wearing the same color (we picked turquoise, because it was the kind of thing that distinguished us from being just a bunch of kids who just happened to be wearing, say, identical navy blue shirts that day) and riding our bikes up and down Fox Glenn and Sawmill roads, glaring at people in their yard while they were mowing their lawns or getting the mail or whatever, but it escalated pretty quickly. There was this little yapping dog that lived a few houses down from me who was never on a leash and would always chase after the wheels of your car or bicycle when you rode past, and your first reaction would be to freak out and swerve, because it would run right up next to your wheel and disappear and you were sure you were going to hit it, even though no one ever did (it finally got gobbled up a few years later by a coyote that had been roaming the neighborhood for a few weeks). Well we took this dog and we tied a rope to its collar and tied it to this big oak tree, without even leaving it enough room to run. All it could do was jump up and down and bark. I’m not even sure the dog knew it was being punished or targeted by our gang or whatever, but to make sure the owners knew, we carved the name of our gang (at that time the “Fox Cliffs Crew,” although that would change many times) into the tree above it. Then we kept riding back and forth past the house all day glaring, although no one came out until nearly dinner and by then most of us had already split off and gone home.

That night at dinner I told my mom and my sister that I was a gang leader now, and that we had committed an act of gang violence against a neighborhood dog.

“With your friends Rocco and Justin?”

“And Scott,” I said, “and a bunch of other kids.”

“Is that what you’re always doing, riding your bikes around real slow?” she asked. We had been glaring at her for a while now whenever she went out to sunbathe on the front lawn, but I’m not sure she ever noticed. My mom sunbathed wearing clothes—shorts and a tee shirt. All she wanted was a farmer’s tan, she said, because she believed that expose any more of yourself to the sun and you were vulnerable to stomach cancer. We had a real wacky doctor who convinced my mom for years that she was allergic to dairy, because of a test he had run where he had her hold a hunk of cheese to her chest and pressed her arm down, and the fact that it stayed down rather than bouncing right back up showed that the cheese was hindering her autoimmune system. It took years of the same symptoms no matter how far she stayed away from dairy to figure out that she was actually allergic to dander, but in the meantime, pretty much everything we kept in the house was soy-based.

“We’re patrolling our turf,” I said. “And now we’re going to start enforcing it.”

“If any of those kids climb up our trees no bike for the rest of the summer,” she said.

I convened an emergency gang meeting that night to discuss our next move.”

“We need to hit the Cassotis,” suggested Ryan. The Cassotis who traveled a lot and bought motorcycles instead of having kids. We didn’t know much about what they did except one morning when the guy (Ward) was out weeding I saw a swarm of identical black SUVs drive up, whereupon a bunch of guys in black suits with black suits and sunglasses roughed him up for the better part of an hour until he broke down crying and pointed to the backyard. Then the government guys got a bunch of shovels and started ripping up the yard until they found a briefcase buried under a grill and drove off with it, leaving Ward there on his knees with his gardening gloves, just looking at the ground. Right after that the two of them took a trip to St. Maarten’s and when they came back a couple weeks later they took their name off the mailbox and started spending a lot less time in the yard.

“We could do something to my little sister,” suggested Justin. His little sister was always tagging along whenever we did anything, including gang stuff, which was kind of a drag. It annoyed Justin in particular, because she would always try to get on our good side by telling us embarrassing things about her brother, like that he still has his old Care Bears poster rolled up in his closet and sometimes she catches him looking at it when he thinks everyone else is asleep.

I shook my head. We needed something bigger. Something that would get everyone talking about us. Maybe we could parlay this into a profitable thing—protection money, and whatnot. So it wouldn’t be a single prank to one specific target. We needed to strike fear into the hearts of the entire neighborhood. I made this impassioned speech and everyone agreed that we would sneak out after midnight and knock over everyone’s garbage cans.

Mike couldn’t wait until midnight because he had to go to bed early that night for a doctor’s appointment the next morning, so we all met in the cul-de-sac in front of my driveway at 9:30. It was still kind of light out, so I convinced everyone to wait until 10, and then we started.

We needed to hit as many houses as quickly as possible, so the focus was on quantity rather than quality. We split up into two groups that each took a different side of the street, pulled the cap off the can and then threw it to the ground. We didn’t have the time or the stomach to cut into any of the bags and spread the garbage around, so we decided that just knocking over the cans and maybe pulling the top back out into the street was enough. We moved quickly and quietly—the only sound we made was the big thud and scrape of the plastic cans against the pavement. We kept shooting each other glances, because we knew this meticulously planned mayhem, this carefully organized chaos, was the greatest thing any of us had ever done.

We were almost done—we had just a few more houses to get to at the top of Sawmill—when we heard a car flying up the street behind us. We saw the headlights first, and then a big vehicle that kind of looked like an ice cream truck did a powerslide maybe fifty yards away from us. A guy got out of the driver’s seat with what looked like a rifle (!) and ran to join the guy who had gotten out of the passenger’s seat with a rifle of his own behind the car. And then before any of us had a chance to react, there was a quick PFFT sound and Bo dropped hard.

We ran for our lives up the street. There were more PFFTs and we heard the bullets whiz past us. Scott dropped on my left; Zach on my right. The rest of us split up and I covered my head and jumped into the woods at Sawmill’s dead end and just kept running back.

We thought the PFFTs were coming from sniper rifles or something that had been silenced. As it turns out, they were only tranquilizer guns. The guys who had been shot were not dead; they were merely groggy. This wasn’t the police or some rival gang; it was Animal Control. Turns out someone on Fox Glenn had called to report a bunch of small bears pawing through his trash and Animal Control hadn’t realized their mistake until they heard the bears they were shooting at screaming “HELP” and “RUN,” whereupon they fled the scene about as fast as humanly possible.

I didn’t know this in the woods, however. I huddle against a tree right in front of this little stagnant creek. I wondered if the water was fresh, and how long I would be able to survive out here. Maybe this is where I’ll make my home from now on, I thought. On the lam, drinking creekwater and dew, catching rabbits and squirrels. I could hide in trees during the day. I could teach myself to jump from branch to branch and never touch the ground unless it was to pounce on some unsuspecting rodent. This is my life now.

I heard a crunch. Someone had stepped on a twig. The person was just a few feet away. I heard dry leaves creak under his sneakers. When I felt his breath on my neck I turned around and slammed my wrist into his face as hard as I could. He went, “aww!” and fell on his ass; I ran. What I had done is I had given David a bloody nose, but I did not stay to investigate.

I ran out of the woods back into the street. I saw the truck was gone, but I kept sprinting as hard as I could right down the middle of the road, thinking the guys with their rifles might jump out from behind any bush at any time and kill me. I passed the bodies of my comrades and had to close my eyes to shield myself from the horror. One of them was groaning.

I didn’t stop sprinting until I made it back to my house, at which point I collapsed from exhaustion on the front porch. I just lay there panting for a few minutes, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I heard someone at the bottom of our driveway (I had made it back home from the neighbors’ yard) put the trash back in the can and stand it back up. I heard their footsteps head back up the driveway, up the front walk, whereupon they stopped right behind me. I knew I should run or fight, but I was too sapped to even move.

“What’s your problem,” my dad asked.

I couldn’t answer.

“Your idiot friends knocked over our trash cans,” he said. He kicked me to make sure I was listening. I nodded. “Tell them next time I see them in the street I’m not braking.” I tried to force myself to cry because I thought my friends were dead.

I think I figured out what had really happened the next morning, when I went to check up on the crime scene and found my dead friend Zach mopping his driveway. He had confessed to his parents about the garbage cans and was in pretty serious trouble. I stood in the street, trying to piece everything together and Zach stopped mopping for a second to glare back at me.

Connect the dotses

2008-07-17T20:43:00.002-05:00

You're giving the sermon

2008-07-16T14:37:00.002-05:00

I didn't want to go to church. I pretended to be asleep. It was hard, because I woke up early, and I was laying (lying?) there for hours under the covers, waiting for her to leave already. Once she went downstairs and opened and closed the garage door. I think she was trying to draw me out. But it was way too early and I stayed in bed and didn't get caught.

So after that she just came upstairs and started hitting me, so I got up.

I drove. I insisted on driving. I took a left where I was supposed to take a right, but she grabbed the wheel and turned us around. So I stomped on the pedal and sped right past the church, but she jumped between my leg and pressed the brake with her hands, and then grabbed the wheel again and turned us around. So I hit her in the nose and while she was distracted trying to stop the bleeding I drove the car into a stream and hit a tree on the other side. So she got out and said "we're walking."

We got to the church, dripping water and scraping mud on the carpet. The organ prelude was playing. We walked into the chapel room, and just before we were in the sanctuary, she pulled my sleeve and said, "you're giving the sermon today."

"What do you mean?"

"The pastor wanted a week off, so I volunteered you to give the sermon."

"This week?"

"Yup."

I headed back into the chapel room and sat down at an old wooden table, because now I had to write a sermon, I guess.

She followed me out there. "The theme is 'faith of my father,'" she said.

"What does that mean?"

She handed me a Bible and a program that indicated the verse in question. Inside, they had already moved passed the opening greeting and were well into the first hymn.

I started flipping through the Bible, but I couldn't find the passage. The page number was a misprint or something, I think. I gave up and started combing the hymns, hoping for some inspiration there. It wasn't a real hymn, though, some American-themed jingoistic thing some dude in the church had written. It had no tune. Inside, they blazed through the children's message. I had like ten minutes and not a single word.

"My grandfather went to church sometimes," I scrawled on the back of my program. Trash. I crossed it out. I could just lie, just make up a bunch of weepy stories about faith and fathers and Jesus, talk for three or four minutes if I go real slow, let everyone out early. They would like that, anyway. It was summer.

She came out to check up on me. "I don't have a word," I said. I was almost crying. "Not a single word."

"I can make it go away," she said, real low, right in my ear. "Just ask me and I can make it all go away. But you have to ask."

I knocked her over and ran up to the pulpit. They weren't done reading the scripture yet, but I told everyone to stop now, because I was ready to give my sermon now.

They were all quiet. Not silent, because the pews were creaking and people were clearing their throats and sucking on mints and rustling their stiff church clothes, but quiet. All their eyes were on me. I hadn't a word.

I shuffled through the papers on the pulpit, hoping the pastor had left something behind I could steal. All he had up there were doodles of people from the church he hated, being hurt, with axes through their heads and whatnot. A couple crosswords, some box scores, nothing theological. Everyone was looking at me.

I cleared my throat and looked at everyone looking up at me. I grabbed the microphone, then rearranged it. I heard no sound. I hit the mic and it made no sound through the speakers. Was the mic hooked up? It was a small church anyway; we didn't really need a mic. Still. I grabbed the cord and tugged. It ran under the pulpit through a small hole drilled in the top. I tugged again. Both times, it didn't give.

I punched a hole through the top of the pulpit. It was thin wood and it shattered right away. The cord was tangled up with a lot of other cords that went through a tunnel. I pulled at the mic's cord (it was the only white one), ripping it away from the others. I stepped through the hole in the pulpit, holding on tight to that cord.

I crawled through the tunnel, ripping the cord free of the wall and the tangle of other cords along the way. It kept going deeper and deeper and deeper until I didn't know which direction was which anymore. I followed the cord all the way to the end of a tunnel to a small, dusty room in the basement, below the church and all its worshipers, with dozens of cords and a couple of radiators and big, hollow water heaters, and the room throbbed with power and charge and spirit, maybe.

Fired for stealing company garbage

2008-07-15T23:30:00.003-05:00

BOSS: Jenkins, I'm sorry, but we're going to have to let you go.
JENKINS: Wha--why? Is there something wrong with my performance.
BOSS: We can't have thieves working here, and you've been stealing from the company.
JENKINS: Why, whatever do you mean?

JENKINS considers the millions he's embezzled from the company. With two fingers, he strokes the revolver he has hidden in his jacket pocket.

BOSS: Don't play retarded, Jenkins. We have security footage of you taking home your used paper cups with you at the end of the day, rather than throwing them in the trash. Packing used papers in your briefcase.
JENKINS: So?
BOSS: So? That's the company's garbage, that's what's so!
JENKINS: Well if it's just going to get thrown away, I guess I just don't see what the big deal is.
BOSS: Don't see? We've missed our garbage quota for the last three months because of you!
JENKINS: Quota?
BOSS: Yes! Why, without garbage, what would birds use to build their nests?
JENKINS: Straw? Or grass?
BOSS: Not small birds! Large birds! Man-sized birds, who wear suits and work in office buildings!

A breeze moves the curtain. JENKINS spies a large nest made of rope, cardboard and office detritus on the ledge. BOSS notices and closes the window with his face.

JENKINS: I guess I hadn't thought of that.
BOSS: Well that's the kind of attitude that's getting you fired, Jenkins. Always thinking of yourself instead of the large birds who need your garbage to build their homes and lay their eggs.

BOSS begins preening his feathers. He spits a mite the size of an orange onto his desk.

What my cell phone thinks I'm typing when I'm typing the last names of my friends

2008-07-15T20:46:00.002-05:00

If there is an * next to your name, change it right this second

Sierant = Piercmu

Ridgeway = Siegeway *

Lapage = Lasci? (question mark means it gives up)

Rioux = Sioux

Greco = Grea?

Liu = Lit

Calusine = Balusine *

Schafer = Saga?

Dalal = Falck *

Pradham = Spadian

Spurrier = Spursifs

DeVuono = Fetuono

Jorgensen = Koshe?

Kaseta = Lard?

Siok = Pink

Rimmer = Phones **

Turbovsky = Turbously ***

Sartinsky = Partinrly

What to do while you wait for your growth spurt

2008-07-10T18:02:00.004-05:00

Hey kids. Do you feel like all your friends have had their growth spurts already? Are your peers' voices cracking, leaving you the only boy capable of pulling off a soprano solo in your school choir? Are you overlooked at school dances because you can't seem to match the masculinity of stubble with your perfectly-shaped bowl cut? Don't despair. Many young men like yourselves have gone on to success, even if they were the only ones in their class who couldn't reach the top shelves of their lockers without receiving a boost from a friendly calculus teacher.

In the meantime, you're looking at a lot of years of embarrassment, torment and misery. But buck up! With these easy tips, you can turn your puberty from "emotionally scarring" to "like being tossed around by the waves in an angry ocean--just close your eyes, hold your breath and pray for it to be over" in no time!

1) Hope is not your friend.
Look. You're going to be small. I'm sure that, deep down, you know this. People will try to tell you that you're a "late bloomer" and that next year is the year you're really going to break out. In third grade, they well tell you that their son was short like you in third grade and by the time fifth grade rolled around, he was the tallest kid in his class. They will tell you that their nephew was short like you in seventh grade, but by the time he graduated high school, he was the fattest guy they knew. They will tell you that their friend's brother was short like you in eleventh grade, but by the time he got married, he had three kids from previous relationships and died of a heart attack in the middle of intercourse. They are lying.

You will grow only when your body is damn good and ready. And you won't end up taller than anybody else. People end up being tall because they start tall and then their height is encouraged by body-stretching activities like basketball and who the hell knows what else. If anything, your spine will become compressed after cramming yourself into all the things you end up cramming yourself into (lockers, gym bags, guitar cases) in your desperate search for approval from your tall friends. At best, you find yourself checking in at "average" a few years down the line. And you will savor it.

2) Find a "thing."
To help with the difficult adjustment of the college years, find an annoying quirk or affectation with which you can become identified. After all, you don't want to be "the short guy." It might not seem like an improvement to become "the guy who's always humming" or "the queer who wears a powdered wig," but at least you can control that (at least until it inevitably becomes
a compulsion and your palms sweat and you start having panic attacks whenever you leave the house without your cape).

3) Don't become resentful!
It's pretty easy to be a short kid who falls into the trap of hating everyone and everything around him for no good reason. It happens to even the best of us every now and then. But you don't want to be a bitter ball of hatred all the time. Every crowd needs a good-natured, wise-cracking short guy! You can be that guy! Make light of your own size, even when no one else is talking about it. You won't be liked, or accepted. But if you can take your obvious misfortunes in good humor, then you will be respected. And even if that doesn't come close to making you happy, it will be enough to deceive yourself into thinking you're satisfied enough to fall asleep at night.

4) Don't bother.
You will try a lot of crazy things to get bigger. You will try to stretch yourself out by hanging from the back deck. Too embarrassed to join a gym or ask for real equipment, you will do bicep curls with your mother's leg weights and bench press your saxophone case. You will go on reverse-diets, in which you will stuff yourself with food until you don't feel like moving, or you will make yourself milkshakes until your parents refuse to buy you anymore ice cream. And through it all, you will not grow an inch or gain a pound.

Think of your body like a machine. You need food as fuel--the excess is then added to the body in the form of fat or muscle. You may begin to think of your body, with its accelerated metabolism, as more of a black hole, into which matter is simply sucked before its components vanish and enter another dimension (nowhere near your chest, through which your ribs are still sticking out). But that's not the whole story. After all, it takes a lot of fuel to keep a machine going, especially when the machine is doing so much sighing and weeping and regretting all the time. Premature wistfulness burns a lot of calories! Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do until you're so beaten down that your soul just scabs over and you can't feel anything anymore.

Last but not least,
5) When you finally do grow, don't forget to stop acting like a short person!
After a lifetime of being the smallest person you know, all of a sudden, your puberty will zip by and you won't even take the time to enjoy it! Through your formative years you felt nothing but the kind of inadequacy that will never go away. There's nothing you can do about that. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend to have at least a modicum of self-respect. Your late start has past, which means now you're on a level playing field. Strangers will never know the difference! That attractive girl, that intimidating would-be mugger, that job interviewer--none of them know you were ever short. At least, they don't until you find yourself incapable of making eye contact or doing anything but mumble into your collar and try to excuse yourself as quickly as possible. When meeting someone new, just repeat to yourself, "this person does not know why I should be ashamed," and watch your self-confidence skyrocket! In a few years, you may even be having conversations with adults!

Snowing in Pandaland

2008-07-04T14:01:00.000-05:00

It was snowing in Pandaland. That's when we've got to close the exhibit down and throw tarps over the pandas. The pandas don't like the snow, I've been told. They don't like the tarps either, but at least they're warm and dry under there, presumably. They always spend the duration of the snowfall trying to escape, so the whole time it's snowing you just hear the crinkling sound of the pandas trying to push the tarps off of them. The tarps aren't weighted down or anything, but pandas aren't very smart, I guess.

The trend in animal containment facilities is to recreate the animal's natural habitat as closely as possible, so it's like an African subsaharan grassland or whatever only in a big pit with thick concrete walls. This makes visitors happy, it is believed, because the visitors believe the animals are happy. The Pandaland bosses saw another way. Pandaland is like a peaceful panda suburb. There are ranch houses, built to about a 1:3 scale with driveways and front yards, and inside they have living rooms and kitchens and master bedrooms. There's a school and a park and a town hall, where once every four years we round them up and make them vote. If you're imagining pandas living like us--driving around, sitting at desks all day then coming home and parking themselves in front of the TV and falling asleep on the couch--then you're way off. The pandas just walk around all this, mostly. These things are obstacles to them. One panda last fall got up onto a roof and knocked off its neighbor's satellite dish, which was a bitch to reinstall. And we had to reinstall to, because the white noise of the dead signal really spooked them. Like snakes hissing--they must've thought there were snakes someplace.

The trick to throwing the tarps over the pandas is you don't have to sneak up on them or anything, because they never see it coming. You just stroll right up, they look at you, and you throw the tarp. The trick is you've got to be accurate about it. Very accurate. Or else there's trouble. Because if you throw it over them, and they get the idea but there's no tarp over their faces, then they get pissed. And pandas are all cute and cuddly and everything when you're behind some glass panels watching them scratch their backs on a lawnmower, but bears are bears, and you try to stay on their good side.

We had thrown the tarps over the pandas--Nick was who knows where, so it was just Juvy and me. We call Juvy Juvy because he spent some time in Juvenile Hall when he was 22. Six months there before the state caught on. He was a short, skinny guy who couldn't grow a beard so a judge thought he was 16 and he spent a while relearning trig and rereading Pride and Prejudice in the juvenile hall's little school facility and he was enjoying it before they realized their mistake and pulled him out. They were going to send him to real prison, but his papers got lost en route or something because he never made it--they dropped him off at home and never came back for him. I asked him once what he did to get sentenced and he said he'd "nearly killed some guy who deserved it," and he's a pretty decent guy, so I believed him.

So right after we got the tarps over the pandas, Nick comes strolling into the control booth, which is where we work--up in the bell tower of the church in the center of Pandaland, overlooking the whole operation. Nick, by the way, is this fat guy who has this funny smell. Not a bad smell, exactly, but it's just something you don't want to smell if you don't have to. Like lettuce, maybe. Like he's got iceberg lettuce in his pockets and it's turning purple.

"Where the hell have you been?" I asked. Ostensibly, I'm the supervisor, but mainly this means I just have to sign my name to shit, like timecards and whatnot to verify whatever. I sign no matter what, basically.

"Around," he said. "I can't find my girlfriend."

"Have you looked in your imagination?" Juvy said.

Nick took this in stride. He sat down in a chair and reclined, with his feet on the control panel. We have a control panel that controls things like sprinklers, clocks, music, temperature, etc. He kicked a button and the traffic lights started going berserk.

"I have a girlfriend now. Did I not tell you guys?"

"No you did not," I said.

"And she's real too," he said, rubbing his hands together. "She's a REAL KNOCKOUT, THAT'S what she is!" said Nick. This shouting made him winded.

"Uh huh," I said. And that was it for a while, until Nick piped up again.

"I'm dating a girl named Francis," he said. "She's got soft hands and flawless skin and her breath smells like cinnamon."

"Does she have a brain disease?" Juvy asked. "A face like she got clonked with a shovel?"

"Francis is a pretty stupid name for a girl," I pointed out.

"Well it's a pretty stupid name for a boy too!" Nick shot back. I agreed.

We settled into a nice easy silence, Juvy monitoring the video feeds, Nick monitoring the dials, me monitoring the two of them. The higher-ups have warned us to be extra vigilant this week because they just installed a new Little League field with a fence and a scoreboard and dugouts and everything, but the pandas haven't been using it as intended. At first they ignored it, which was OK, but then they knocked over one of the equipment bags and tried chewing on the baseballs and we had a couple of emergency choking situations that had to be resolved by our panda health technicians. They're always wandering the park in panda suits (so the pandas and ideally the guests don’t pick them out as humans) with their earpieces in so they can be dispatched to any corner of Pandaland to take care of any medical emergency. You can tell which ones are the panda health technicians because they walk upright and are always standing face-to-face, talking to each other, presumably, but when you're too far off to hear them it just looks like two dumb pandas staring at each other. Anyway, all of us were quiet for a while until Nick started fiddling with his phone. I pretended not to notice, so Nick sighed real loud.

"I wonder what she's doing right now." In my head, I prayed that Juvy wouldn't take the bait. Juvy muttered "fuck you" under his breath, which was fine by me, since it wasn't really a conversation-starter.

Nick, though, would not be deterred. "I'm just going through some of the messages she's sent me," he said. "You know, I didn't even realize the 3 with the sideways V thing was supposed to be a heart until she told me?"

"You fuck her yet?" Juvy asked, simmering and ready to explode, you could tell.

"Let's try not to be coarse, please."

"Sorry, sorry. Where'd you meet her?"

"In the supermarket," Nick said. "We were both buying the same kind of cereal."

"AH HA!" Juvy shouted, jumping out of his chair with his hands and fingers extended. He looked like an overstressed cartoon dad who had finally had enough. "YOU SEE? HE'S MAKING IT UP. HE'S MAKING IT UP!"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Nick said.

"Buying the same kind of cereal? Cereal?" That's the fucking lamest thing I've ever heard. Shit that lame doesn't happen in real life. It has to be made up by fat pimply virgins who work in Pandaland."

"I've got a picture of her!" Nick yelled (he was yelling now too), grabbing for his wallet. "I've got a picture of her. Want to see?" And he slid a tiny photo out of his wallet--though it took him a few seconds, the way his hands were shaking (and he's got fat fingers too)--and he showed it to us triumphantly.

The girl was nothing special. It looked like a school photo, though more likely it was the kind of thing you get done at Sears. She had dull yellow hair, conservative black blouse, chubby round moon-face. Vacant eyes, stupid smile.

"Let me see that," Juvy said, calmer now.

"No," Nick said quietly, but Juvy had already grabbed the picture out of his hands.

"She looks easy," Juvy said, suddenly contemplative. "And on the dumb side. Maybe decent in school--B- or C-student, but hopelessly naïve and lost, like she doesn’t know what she's ever doing." He held the picture up to the light, like he was looking for a watermark under her forehead or something. "She's using you to build her confidence, and when she has the confidence she needs, she will leave you and find the man she will marry."

He handed the picture back to Nick. We were all silent for a while.

Then Nick said, "she's the smartest person I know."

Juvy laughed, in a good-natured way, though. Well not completely good-natured. But at least 60 or 70% good-natured. "Man, you just don't know when to quit," he said. "I was right the first time; you made her up."

"You're just saying that because you don't want to believe that I can find and keep a girl and you can't."

Which was exactly the wrong thing to say.

Juvy'd had a girl, but she'd killed herself a few weeks back. She was trying to get a teaching degree, but she was truly profoundly stupid, and she ran up against one of these teachers who won't change a grade for anything and he swallowed a bunch of pills and that was that. Pretty little thing, she was. I'd only met her once, at a Pandaland Picnic. She walked into a beehive and had got stung in about a hundred different places and her face swelled up like you were pumping it full of water--and she wasn't in pain or anything, just that her face swelled up, and she was kind of panicking, because she didn't know if something worse was going to happen, and Juvy guided her by the arm to underneath a tree and just held her hand and sat there with her and told her everything was going to be OK, and she just smiled to the best of her ability, with her puffy face and the fear in her eyes and all. Juvy didn't miss a day of work after she'd died. I told him I'd doctor some paperwork for him if it was about the money, but he said no. He'd even convinced the girl's family to hold the funeral on a Sunday night so he wouldn't miss his opening shift at Pandaland (time and a half). I went to the service. It was cold and dark and there were tons of moths--probably the last weekend there were moths before they all died off for the winter. The priest kept getting her name wrong until he must have seen the family frowning at him and he just stopped using her name altogether, just referring to her as "this fine young woman."

All this is just to say, the subject of Juvy's romantic life was still pretty off limits.

So Nick said the thing he said and Juvy blew up. At first he just started screaming syllables that didn't add up to words. Then he overturned a chair, then a second, then he punched the side of a TV screen, which made a weird hollow sound. After that he grabbed the picture back out of Nick's hand and threw it out the window. It was weird, the rage and the force with which Juvy threw the picture out the window, and the pathetic fluttering it did all the way down to the ground. Incongruous.

"My Francis!" Nick screamed. He stuck his head out the window and watched the picture fall. It settled on the cobblestone streets of Pandaland Towne Centre. Snow fell on it and melted.

Nick turned around and jumped for Juvy's throat. Juvy jumped to the side and sent Nick to the ground with a karate chop to the back of the neck. Then he kicked him in the face.

It was at this point that I advised everyone to calm down.

Nick sputtered "you bastard" at Juvy's shoes through a bloody mouth and broken teeth. Juby picked him up by his shirt, opened the hatch and threw Nick down the steep spiral staircase. Nick tumbled all the way down to the bottom, somehow. You'd think even if he didn't have the agility or the presence of mind to grab the railing and hoist himself up, his momentum would have carried him straight into the wall rather than all the way down in tight little circles. He fell all the way down, though.

At this point, I was just trying to calm Juvy down. He was still freaking out, pacing in circles, punching things. I restored a chair to its proper upright position and sat Juvy down and held his face. He bared his teeth like a wild animal. On a security monitor I saw Nick, dazed, combing Pandaland Town Centre for his picture.

"You need to calm down," I told him. "You're displaying some seriously destructive behavior right now and as supervisor I have a duty to warn you that it could impact your employment here." That's when he bit me on the arm.

He drew blood. I jumped back and held the wound. Me and Juvy looked at each other. He was starting to return to normal, but he was still panting and he wasn't quite right yet. He looked like an animal still, but an animal capable of remorse, like a very sympathetic wolverine.

So I did the stupid thing. I said fuck him and fuck his stupid fucking dead girlfriend and found myself somersaulting down the stairs just like Nick had. I ran back up (I only made it halfway down before I stopped), but Juvy had locked the hatch.

I stormed right past Nick, who was still looking for the picture, and headed for the emergency exit. It leads right into the parking lot. I was just going to get the hell out of there. I still had a couple hours left in my shift, but I'd had enough shit for the day. I considered Juvy's bite and wondered if I'd have to get shots.

Walking through the park was pretty eerie. All the pandas were still writhing around under their tarps. There was crinkling from all directions as all the pandas struggled to free themselves from the tarps. They looked like crinkly blue ghosts, trying to push the dead off them. And also Juvy seemed to be mashing all the buttons, because streetlights were flashing, hoses were spitting water, garage doors were opening--it was like the suburbs had come to life and were overthrowing their masters or whatever.

I got to the exit and opened the door and was stepping out when Juvy did a very stupid thing. He turned on the emergency sirens. We'd only had to use them once before--when the art museum had caught fire. The idea behind it, I guess, was to alert the pandas to any danger, but all it did was make them really agitated and angry. So angry that even when we cut the sirens, the pandas were still fucking shit up for a while. We weren't able to leave the control tower for hours after that--the three of us on the crew that night had to sleep on the floor. One of the emergency health personnel in a panda suit got found out as a human and got clawed in the thigh pretty bad. He had to swim out to the jetski harbor in the middle of Lake Panda and just bled out there for a while in his suit with his panda head floating in the water, because all the pandas were standing around the shore, salivating. The standoff went on until we had to release an emergency honey reserve from the top of Great Panda Tree, and that distracted the bears long enough for the guy to paddle back to shore on a raft and limp out of the park.

The alarm seemed to be having a similar effect on these pandas that evening. They got real mad and started growling under their tarps. The clawing got more frantic and everyone started getting angrier and I saw a panda free itself. It was the first time a panda had ever gotten out from underneath a tarp before and it reacted kind of like I imagine the first human reacted to burning itself with the first fire. Just stood there, pretty confused, and then the clouds started lifting and he just got really fucking pissed off.

The panda put the tarp in its mouth and shook back and forth. In the process, it pulled the tarp off another confused and angry panda. The wheels were really turning in those two pandas' heads and they started pulling tarps off other pandas, with their mouths. I was just standing there by the exit in awe of these things. And then when there were six or seven of them free, they saw Nick, oblivious to the whole thing, still pawing around for his picture. The pandas started off towards him.

The siren was still going off, and there were angry pandas everywhere. I let the emergency exit close behind me. Nick was going to get it if I didn't do something. I was right next to Panda Hunting Lodge, so I broke in and grabbed the shotgun hanging over the fireplace. Behind the bar, there was a poacher's head on a plaque. It was a mechanical thing that, if you growled at it, it sprung to life and said something goofy, like, "whoa, how did I get here?" and "help!" This, I considered, might be sending pandas the wrong lesson. I jumped out of the hunting lodge through an open window and headed towards Pandaland Towne Centre.

By the time I got there, Nick and the bears were gone. I stepped on his picture of Francis--it had been right here and the idiot had somehow missed it. The siren was still going and I called up to Juvy to turn the damn thing off already. He was in no condition to respond. I couldn't hear him through the windows, but I could see him laughing and screaming like a madman and shaking his fists at the heavens in victory. I heard Nick scream "help!" from the post office. Nick was in a bad way.

I burst into the post office. There were three pandas milling around in the lobby. I aimed and fired--they collapsed onto the counter, dripping blood onto a pile of fake panda letters. Every once in a while, we deliver a package of salmon, and the pandas all crowd around the post office, tearing into everything, looking for the food. That's fun.

I jumped into the counter and headed into the mail sorting room. There was a panda guarding the door. I was about to blast it point blank, but it knocked the gun out of my hands. I dove for it, but the panda shoved me out of the way. This is it, I thought, until I realized that it was one of the panda suit guys. "Don't shoot me, you idiot!" he hissed, as loudly as he could afford to without losing his cover. "He's in there," pointing at the little back office. "I did everything I could."

I snuck around and peeked into the office. A panda was batting at Nick in the corner--having his way with him. Nick was sobbing, pretty much ready to die, I think. I jumped in and fired three times, bam bam bam. I hit the panda in the back, then the leg, then the chest as it turned towards me. It twisted and fell on top of the desk, knocking a computer to the ground.

"Thanks," Nick said, weakly. I jumped over the desk to check up on him. A big bloody red hole screamed up at me. Some of the shot had gone straight through the panda and into Nick's thigh. He was losing blood fast.

I tucked the gun under my right arm and dragged Nick out of the post office by his armpits. He was giggling--giggling! I would have been angry, but I knew he was just losing it, and I was too scared. Outside, I heard growling and crinkling and a thud.

In the lobby, the panda suit guy was beating back the real thing with his fake panda head. The panda just swatted it away absent-mindedly and kept clawing at the guy's stomach. I fired and missed, but it scared the panda off. The panda suit put his head back on and curled up into a ball, sobbing underneath the PO boxes along the wall.

We made it outside. Pretty much all of the pandas were free now and they didn't know what to do with themselves. I don’t know if it was the sirens or the snow or if they were still disoriented from the tarps, but they were going nuts. A couple of them were fighting each other; two more were humping right in front of the Panda's Mosque. And there was a whole crowd of them standing in a circle in Pandaland Towne Centre. I fired into the air and they scattered. Juvy was lying face down, limbs extended, body flattened, blood everywhere. He had jumped.

A bear growled behind my left ear and I whirled around and plugged a bullet into its gut. It flew backwards and toppled over a trash bin filled with birdseed. Other pandas saw this and started lumbering towards me. Nick moaned; I had to get him to a hospital. I did the best I could--I lifted him up and rolled him onto the roof of the post office, where hopefully he would be out of the animals' reach. I hoped he would hold out for a little longer, because I knew I was going to be there for a while, dodging teeth and deflecting claws and wasting pandas.

Marmaduke loves America

2008-07-03T21:10:00.006-05:00

I taunt my opponents as if I were in a fantasy baseball league this year (I'm not), because I reserve the right to gloat until someone beats me

2008-06-30T20:25:00.005-05:00

Ho hum ho hum, another All Star Break, another insurmountable double-digit lead. Have you guys even been trying again? Every once in a while I'll think to myself, they're not really trying. This is some setup, some elaborate Truman Show-esque ruse, because as good as I am, there's no way I'm this much better than any group of people at fantasy baseball, I mean there's just no way. But then one of you will go and do something like trade me JD Drew the day Ortiz goes down or snap up Johnny "Flavor of the Month" Cueto while neglecting to pick Edison "Cy" Volquez that renews my faith in your utter ineptitude.

Let's start from just below the top. Another admirable effort, Lynch, but this year just ain't your year. Do us all a favor and step away from the waiver wire. Your early season frustrations with Drew were understandable. Too bad for all of us you didn't ride him through June--you be within striking distance. How's Chipper Jones treating you? I haven't been keeping up with him lately (counting all of Drew's extra base hits this month has been pretty time-consuming, as you might imagine)--he still hitting .400? Oh well, I'm sure you're happy with the deal. I mean, your outfield is pretty crowded anyway--what, with Granderson, Hunter Pence and Vernon Wells. That's a lot of disappointment for one team to handle. Not to mention Phil Hughes--yikes. Too bad AAA stats don't count--when he gets healthy and the Yanks send him to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, he'll be mowing them down again in no time. Send Travis "Total Attrition" Hafner my regards when he gets off the DL.

Commissioner Newman. Congrats on snagging David Wright. A solid third- or fourth-round choice. It's just a shame you used the number 1 overall pick on him. I mean, I would expect you to foresee the kind of season Lance Berkman is having (me, 15th round), and maybe your advanced scouts hadn't heard about Hanley Ramirez (me, 1st round), but you've got to go higher-value for the number 1 pick. That's my advice for next year--treasure it. Maybe you were worried JayJayMets would take him first, but here's some more advice for you: never ever worry about JayJayMets. Also, Bronson Arroyo as your 24th round "sleeper special," I think you said--sorry. I guess you figured, "he was Sartinsky's sleeper two years ago, he's got it in him for one more run at the top!" Play for this year, not last year--that's my final piece of advice. By the way, you can stop clogging my proposed trades inbox with requests for Cole Hamels. Cole is quite happy with my team (he wants a second ring). Not that I'm averse to changing things up, but if you're serious about making a move, you'll have to do a little better than Aubrey Huff.

Poor Jeff Greco. It's a good thing you get bored with this league three weeks in or else you'd be pretty disappointed with the carnage that is your starting lineup. Lynch talked all year last year about how his biggest mistake was drafting Johan in the first round--did you really think a move to the NL and another year past his prime was going to make that blunder look better? You've got good instincts, though. I can tell because every time I picked someone, (Papelbon, fourth round; Lincecum, eighth; SHEETS, eleventh), you always chimed in with a timely "aw, I was JUST ABOUT TO PICK HIM!!!!" A little quicker on the draw next year and maybe you'll be in contention. Although you did beat me to Erik Bedard, so nice work there.

Josh. I didn't think your Jason Bay gaffe could be topped, but dropping Ian Kinsler? To make room for Adam Dunn? I mean, I like Adam Dunn, but--not your finest moment as GM. The fact that you realized it immediately as evidence by your "holy shit oops" message posted mere minutes after the transaction took place barely makes it better. Changing your team name to the "What Have I Dunns?" was appreciated, though.

Ben--congratulations on a solid season. Fifth place again, but your franchise is making some serious improvements. OK, so Andruw Jones kind of sucks worse than ever, but that's OK. I can see how you might have thought--new team, new contract, he's headed for a bounceback year. I mean, I guess that argument was less convincing when you said, as you drafted him, "I'm picking this guy because he's on the Dodgers and he spells his name like an asshole," but we all have our good-luck charms. Brad Penny's hurt you, but since you only drafted him because you heard he's "nailing Elisha Dushku," I'm not sure that even matters (and at least you kept him out of Lynch's hands--very kind of you). And, I mean, I wouldn't continue keeping Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds on the roster if I were you, but if Bonds does get picked up one of these days, I may eat my words. Clemens might end up in jail, though, so don't say I didn't warn you.

JayJayMets. What can I say? I guess I can understand how you might be disappointed that Jose Reyes wasn't available at #5--but your first round choice of the midget who used to follow Pedro around was puzzling. Because he's dead, mostly. You hadn't heard about that? Yeah, couple years ago, I think. So you kind of stumbled out of the gate, but you recovered nicely, I thought, picking up Carlos Quentin. Oh wait, that was Carlos Delgado? Well, his slugging percentage is almost .500. I mean, only 80 points shy. Within shouting distance. You've had it tough, though, I realize this. You have to deal with the shame of losing to Ben Simpson, a guy who took Ryan Spilborghs in the third round because his name sounded like Spielberg. You have to deal with the indignity of Yahoo ranking you in seventh place in a league that only contains six teams. And we were all taken aback when your second baseman got fired a couple weeks back. Although you should know that Willie Randolph is a manager now. He doesn't play anymore.

There there, gents, that wasn't so bad, was it? Chins up, better luck next year.

You should get this one

2008-06-24T23:56:00.003-05:00

TREBECK
This is Jeopardy and here are your contestants.

CONTESTANT 1
Hi.

CONTESTANT 2
Hello.

CONTESTANT 3
Hi.

TREBECK
And now let's take a look at the categories. Category 1, Category 2, Category 3, Category 4, Girls CONTESTANT 1 Has Dated--

CONTESTANT 1
Hmm?

TREBECK
Category 6. Contestant 1, you have control of the board.

CONTESTANT 1
Uh, I'm gonna go with--no, let's stay away from that. Category 1 for 200.

TREBECK
It's the third-largest U.S. state in area.

CONTESTANT 1 buzzes in.

CONTESTANT 1
What is California.

TREBECK
Correct. You guess again.

CONTESTANT 1
Uh--

TREBECK
C'mon, let's go.

CONTESTANT 1
All right, Girls CONTESTANT 1 has dated for 200.

TREBECK
CONTESTANT 1 was humiliated--

CONTESTANT 1
Hey.

TREBECK
--after his relationship with this seventh grade chemistry partner ended when she found making out with him "boring and weird."

CONTESTANT
Who is Alissa?

TREBECK
Correct.

CONTESTANT 1
She said that?

TREBECK
Select again.

CONTESTANT 1
Category 2 for 200.

TREBECK
"Hakuna Matata" was one of 3 tunes nominated for an Oscar from this Disney film.

CONTESTANT 2 buzzes in.

CONTESTANT 2
What is "The Lion King."

TREBECK
Correct, it's your board.

CONTESTANT 2
Let's try Girls CONTESTANT 1 Has Dated for 400.

CONTESTANT 1
Hey, what do you think you're doing?

TREBECK
What began as a one-night hookup in college turned into an interminable two-year relationship, ending only when CONTESTANT 1 failed to show at her mother's funeral.

CONTESTANT 3 buzzes in.

CONTESTANT 1
Hey!

CONTESTANT 3
Who is Renee?

TREBECK
No, anyone else?

CONTESTANT 1 buzzes in.

CONTESTANT 1
Who is Becky?

TREBECK
Correct.

CONTESTANT 1
And I was trying to get to that funeral, I had food poisoning.

TREBECK
Select again.

CONTESTANT 1
Fine. Girls I dated for 600.

TREBECK
This girl was nice, but once CONTESTANT 1's brother said she reminded him of their mother, CONTESTANT 1 found himself unable to perform sexually.

CONTESTANT 1
Oh fuck you.

CONTESTANT 3 buzzes in.

CONTESTANT 3
Who is Tara?

TREBECK
Correct. Back out of the red, select again.

CONTESTANT 1 begins shivering.

The time I got the wind knocked out of me

2008-06-23T00:26:00.005-05:00

Unlike most of the other trash I post on here that are ostensibly true, this story is actually true.

I had my first sleepover birthday party when I was in fourth grade. It was a pretty big deal, naturally. I had Daniel, David and Chris R. over for the night. The get-together was sort of in the weird in-between stage between the old parties--there was cake--and the newer, older, more "mature" ones. There were no organized games or anything like that, the kinds of things my mom liked to throw herself into. We spent most of the night up in my room playing Super Nintendo.

So there we were, playing Super Nintendo. My mom had picked up a few games from Blockbuster, including Wheel of Fortune, which is what we were playing the time I got the wind knocked out of me. And we were having fun, playing Super Nintendo Wheel of Fortune at a birthday party.

Super Nintendo only has two controllers, of course, so it was me against Chris R. and a computer player, who was on the easiest setting and so was basically a nonfactor. It was the first round, I think, and Chris R. was dominating. The category was "Thing," I think, or maybe "Literature" or something, and so far what we'd had was "TO _ILL _ MOC_ING_IRD." We all knew it was TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by this point (even though none of us had read the book or seen the movie) and it just came down to who could solve the puzzle and cash in.

Cashing in was exactly what Chris R. had in mind. I had a few hundred bucks, the computer may have had nothing, and Chris R. had like $16000. Something in the five figures, anyway. But he was not content to stop there. Oh no. He kept going and going, and his plan was only to solve the puzzle after all the consonants were filled in and he had made as much money as possible. All I'd gotten was the T, I think, right at the beginning, and he'd gotten all the rest of the letters, so he felt he was entitled. So he kept spinning and spinning, picking up every dollar he could, until he landed on Bankrupt.

When Chris R. went Backrupt, it was the computer's turn. The computer guessed P, lost its turn and then it was me. Being the weasel I am (and I am such a weasel), I solved without taking any chances by spinning. Chris R. got nothing, I got my $600 or whatever it was and I celebrated my lead.

Chris R. was upset by this, quite naturally. I mean, not real upset, but like, fake upset, or friend upset, or whatever. Because the least I could have done was spun at least once, to give him one more chance. But I had just piggybacked on all his work for the easy win. So we started wrestling, and he was much larger than me at the time, and much stronger and much more fit, so I was on the ground and he jumped on my back and all of a sudden I couldn't breathe.

What had happened was I'd had the wind knocked out of me. Having the wind knocked out of you is no big deal, of course. Wikipedia sez:

Getting the wind knocked out of you is a phrase that mainly refers to a kind of diaphragm spasm that occurs when sudden force is applied to the abdomen which puts pressure on the solar plexus. It results in a temporary paralysis of the diaphragm that makes it difficult to breathe for a short period of time.[1][2] It can also occur from a strong blow to the back.

[...]

Often the laryngeal muscles contract during diaphragm spasm producing an inspiratory sound known as stridor which can be heard for several cycles as breathing resumes. Singultus, commonly known as the hiccups, is also a form of diaphragm spasm, although much milder.

So the physiological reality of having the wind knocked out of you is like being stuck in a hiccup, basically. That is the reality of what was going on.

But as far as I knew, I couldn't breathe and I would never breathe again. I was going to die, I thought. I got up and tried to gulp air in like a fish, and I pounded my throat and probably wheezed "I can't breathe," to the extent that I could wheeze since there was no air coming in or out of me. I honestly thought I was going to die.

I staggered out of my room and into the hallway. There I bumped into my sister. I think I was on my knees at this point, grabbing at the wall. She was horrified, naturally (she would have been in first grade at this point) and ran downstairs, screaming to get my mother's attention. I made my way over to the stairs, crawled onto the top step and collapsed there, basically.

My sister was still freaking out and made my mother run into the foyer. "Are you OK?" she called from the bottom of the stairs. I had basically resigned myself to the fact that I was going to die at this point. I was going to die over a dispute with one of my best friends during a game of Super Nintendo Wheel of Fortune at my fourth grade sleepover birthday party. I wondered if all that would fit on my tombstone.

And then, I realized that I was breathing. Tears were drying on my cheeks. I stood up and felt my chest and my face, like I couldn't believe I was still there, and just stood there panting. "I couldn't breathe," I told her. "Chris R. jumped on me, accidentally, and I couldn't breathe."

"You got the wind knocked out of you," she said, already heading back into the kitchen. My sister followed her, pretty confused. I kept standing there for a second before I headed back into my room, because, what else could I do?

I walked back in expecting my friends to be waiting to see if I had died. I wasn't sure why they hadn't run out into the hall after me, trying to help--maybe they had stayed in my room to form a prayer circle. At least they would be a little worried. But Daniel and David were just sitting there playing Wheel of Fortune. They had both had the wind knocked out of them before and they knew what was going on, so while I was in the hall going through my death throes, they had just taken over me and Chris R.'s controllers. I was a little hurt, I guess, but the important thing is I was alive.

Chris R. had never had the wind knocked out of him before, and he had never seen such a thing either. So like me, he had thought I was dying. And as bad as it was for me to be out there groping for air and collapsing on the stairs, he was thinking, "I just murdered my friend on his ninth birthday."

"Where'd Chris R. go?" I asked. "I think he's in there," Daniel said, pointing at the closet. And that's when Chris R. stepped out. Because that's what he had done when he thought he had murdered me--he had hid (from the cops, I guess, or from my parents) in the closet.

"You're OK?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

And the two of us sat down, both still kind of shaking, and asked Daniel and David if we could get our controllers back, since it was still our game, after all.

My dumbshit baby

2008-06-20T22:55:00.003-05:00

The baby is crying again. So I ask, so what am I supposed to do? I'll go in there, ask it to calm down, and it'll just keep crying. I'll ask it what it wants (using hand signals, since it's pretty hopeless when it comes to understanding spoken language) and it'll just keep on crying. So I close the door, roll up a towel and put it in front of the crack between the door and the floor and whatever. Let it cry.

This baby is such a fucking dumbass. I mean, I know all babies are stupid, but honestly, this one takes the fucking cake. It can't even burp on its own, that's what really riles me up. You have to pick it up and put it over your shoulder and hit its back until you force the air out. I can't keep myself from burping during important dinners and here I am, being made to burp for this baby, or else it gets fussy and cries, natch. Always crying.

Why couldn't we have had a smart baby? Mark at work has a smart baby and he's a moron. Mark's baby can already stand. Swear to God, I think it strolled out of the womb twirling an umbrella. Mark's baby can already reach cookies and sharp knives on high shelves. It stacks shit up and climbs and pulls itself up. Mark and his dumbass wife have to lock up the knives. Seriously, the baby got to a knife last week and Mark's wife flipped out. The baby was just standing there on a trash bin, slicing celery like nothing was up, and it turned its head to watch its mother screaming, and all the while this baby is not even putting the knife down, it's still just slicing away. So they put the knives under lock and key, but the baby's gonna find the key, I guarantee it. Give my dumbshit baby a key and it wouldn't even be smart enough to put it in its mouth. It would just look at you like it was waiting for you to put the thing on a spoon and shove the thing down its throat, waving its dumb fat arms like a maniac.

The baby can't even grab. I know, you don't believe me, "babies grab everything." Not this idiot. You put your finger up to its baby face and all it can do is reach out and push your finger with its palm. I saw a picture the other day of a monkey holding a stick, using it to dig termites out of an old, moldy stump. The monkey'd figured out tools! So, that's just a contrast, to give you some idea of what we're dealing with.

Mark's baby is playing tennis. I saw it. I played against it, in fact. I won 6-4 6-3, but it gave me the workout of my life. The kid returns everything. I don't even know how he gets the ball over the net, but you can't get anything past this baby. It twirls its racket like it's just enjoying the sun pass through the laces and you say, "OK, ace coming up, no prob," and before you know it the baby's scorched a return down the far endline. I throw my socks at my baby and it doesn't even move. Just lets them pile up.

I don't know who our baby gets it from. It looks like me, but I was always a very smart baby. I used to give the dog haircuts. It would just sit in my lap while I trimmed its fur with my safety scissors. And those were fucking good haircuts too. And my wife is smarter I am, although I never admit it. One of the baby's aunts has a brain disease, though I don't think it's that. The baby doesn't have a brain disease; it's just fucking stupid, that's all.

This is our second baby and the first we kept. I was so excited about that first baby. I thought--how wonderful. We'll bring this creature into the world and teach it life. I imagined a blank slate, a clean white page, and with our attention and our love we would fill it with truth until it was the greatest greatest thing that ever was. And what came out of my wife was this shriveled purple thing that was already screaming, that already resented us. It had its own plan and we weren't part of it. "Keep it," I told the doctor and the nurses, "keep it." The two of us went home without the baby and my wife parked herself in front of the TV (she was upset because she still wanted to keep the baby, even though she had seen it just as clearly as I had) and I went out and brought a skateboard and spent the whole rest of the night practicing in the driveway and by the next morning I had already taught myself how to do an ollie and a kickflip and a manual.

Hee hee

2008-06-20T10:01:00.001-05:00

hee.

David S. Mack, a vice chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, backed off on Thursday from statements he had made defending the use of unlimited free travel passes for the authority’s board members and said he would now vote to curtail the perk.

Mr. Mack’s reversal came just hours after Gov. David A. Paterson issued a scorching statement saying that continuing the free travel privilege at a time of economic difficulty would show “an utter contempt for average New Yorkers.”

Mr. Mack, a wealthy real estate executive from Long Island, prompted a storm of controversy on Wednesday when he told reporters that if the free travel passes he received as a transportation authority board member were taken away, he might not ride the Long Island Rail Road any more.

Pretty shameless

2008-06-19T18:40:00.002-05:00

So here's a quick (and possibly partly inaccurate) summary of this article: the MTA Board--the group that runs NYC's mass transit--is not supposed to be compensated for their services. They do receive free passes, so they can ride subways, commuter rails, go through tolls, etc. without paying. It has been suggested by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo that this is a form of compensation, and should be taken away.

The MTA Board--if the NY Times characterization is to be believed--is a bunch of rich old white dudes who all agree with each other and never get mad because they run shit, basically. But taking away their free passes has made them ripping pissed, all of a sudden, at the idea that they might be made to pay like everyone else.

(The other thing is, you don't have to turn over these free passes when you're off the board or anything, like you're turning in your key at work, or something. You're in for life. It's like the Freemasons or something.)

The real fun comes in these rich white dudes trying to rationalize why exactly they deserve these free travel passes. Go, David S. Mack (a vice chairman of the authority), go!

Mr. Mack said that it was important for board members to be familiar with the transportation system they oversaw and that free travel passes encouraged that. In their trips through the system, board members frequently notice problems that can be corrected swiftly with a phone call, he said.

These guys are like superheroes, basically. Or maybe they're more like angels--mysterious servants of God (or the NY transit authorities)--patrolling the subways, the tunnels, correcting Injustices where they are seen. They walk among us, and we are not even aware of their presence! That man who elbows in front of you to cram himself on the express train during rush hour, leaving you waiting at the station for the next one--that's no asshole! He's making sure the car does not struggle to bear its Optimal Max Capacity! That other man who lunges over you to claim a seat, knocking over one of your three bags of groceries in the process--that's no inconsiderate buffoon! He's testing the cleanliness of the seat, and in stretching out his feet to block your access to the bar in front of him (causing you to jostle and stumble for the remainder of the ride), he is actually ensuring that all future passengers will experience Total Comfort!

MTA OFFICE: Yeah.
DAVID S. MACK: Hello. This is David S. Mack, a vice chairman of the authority!
MTA OFFICE: Oh, yes, Mr. Mack! What can I do for you!
DAVID S. MACK: I'm at the 42nd St. Station, waiting for an uptown 2/3 express train. There is a cocktail shrimp on the floor.
MTA OFFICE: Oh, thank you for your call! We'll correct that right away.
DAVID S. MACK: No problem, just doing my job.
[DAVID S. MACK flies straight up, crashing through the ceiling of the station. As he ascends into the cool New York City night, he calls the MTA Office to report some plaster and brick scattered around the 42nd St. Station]

“We’re invaluable,” Mr. Mack said[.]

“If you saw something and called it in, it goes right there,” he added, as he put his foot on top of a wastebasket. “When the normal public calls it in, you know what happens with the bureaucracy, they don’t get the response that a board member would get.”

Yup. He's actually admitting that the organization he serves is an intractable bureaucracy that does not pay attention to the people it is ostensibly meant to serve. And he's doing it in support of his argument. Which, again, is that the people in positions of power should have more perks.

But Mr. Mack, a Long Island resident who says he typically rides the railroad 5 to 10 times a

week?

year

Oh, great, thanks. Great to know we have trained professional eyes like your riding the trains once every month or two.

, said that if he had to pay, he might change his habits.
“Why should I ride and inconvenience myself when I can ride in a car?” he said.

Well if it's your fucking job like you seem to want us to think it is, maybe you should because it's your fucking job.

Mr. Mack also questioned Mr. Cuomo’s motives on the issue.
“What he’s trying to do was strictly a soap box, where it looks good to the common people,” Mr. Mack said.

First of all a soap box is not, in fact, a thing that can be done. It is an object. I can be constructed, or shipped, or climbed to make a point. But saying that someone did a soap box, or pulled a soap box, or really soap boxed it up, is not something that makes a lot of sense.

But "common people" ... man. He just knocked it out of the park there. Well done, David S. Mack. Well done.

The first guy killed

2008-06-17T21:36:00.002-05:00

BOSS: Here we are, on the roof. Nowhere to run now, as if you could run with your hands tied behind the back and your head and your ankles tied together and you being roced to kneel in front of me like you are! Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
HENCHMAN: Heh.
DUNHAM: (muttering) Don't say a word.
BOSS: Oh, you'll tell me where you've hidden those jewels before the sun sets! Oh yes, I think you will!
DUNHAM: Never!
JAMISON: Never.
BOSS: Let's start things off with a "bang," shall we? Dunham, I know you're in charge of this operation. Your partner is useless to me--tell me where the jewels are or he gets it!

(45 seconds of silence)

HENCHMAN: They're not talking, boss.
BOSS: Very well! Throw (points at Dunham) him off the building.
HENCHMAN: You got it.

(Henchman grabs Dunham under the arms and drags him to the ledge.)

DUNHAM: Hey, what the--
BOSS: You were expendable, Jamison. Blame your partner.
DUNHAM: No, I--

(Henchman throws Dunham off the building)

JAMISON: Holy shit!
BOSS: That's right! Now you see how serious we are about those jewels!
JAMISON: Fuck fuck fuck, what did you fucking do, man?
BOSS: If you had spoken up sooner, you could have saved your partner. Now, where are the jewels.
JAMISON: I don't know, man!
BOSS: Don't play coy with me, Dunham. I know you buried--
JAMISON: Dunham is dead! I'm Johnston! Holy shit.
BOSS: What?
JAMISON: Dunham is dead! You threw him off the building, holy shit.
BOSS: I--what? Well, I don't believe you.
HENCHMAN: He's telling the truth, boss.
BOSS: What? How do yo uknow?
HENCHMAN: Cuz I remembered that one was Jamison cuz he has that tattoo on his arm.
JAMISON: It's true, I swear.
HENCHMAN: Also they don't really look anything at all alike.
JAMISON: Oh God, Dunham.
BOSS: God damnit. Well why did you throw the other one off if you know he was the one who hid the jewels?
HENCHMAN: You pointed at him. I figured you knew what you were doing.
BOSS: Well shit. Are you sure you don't know where the jewels are?
JAMISON: Yes! Yes!
BOSS: OK, OK, stop screaming. Henchman, go look over the edge and see if he's still alive down there.

(Henchman looks)

HENCHMAN: No way.
BOSS: Fucking A.
JAMISON: Oh God oh God.
BOSS: Well I don't know how we're going to find those jewels. Unless...

(Days later. Lawyer's office. Dunham's family sits around, dabbing at their eyes. Boss, Henchman and Jamison--still tied up and nervous--sit in chairs in the back, trying to look inconspicuous.)

LAWYER: "And to my beloved daughter Cheryl, I leave $150,000. Take it and make a life with it, and make me proud."

(Cheryl breaks down crying. Boss taps his fingers against his thigh and looks at the clock.)

LAWYER: "And to my faithful wife Diane, I leave the Secret Jewels of Askhamaradon..."

(Boss leans forward nervously.)

LAWYER: "...which are hidden in..." well, no point finishing that sentence, since Diane died in a car crash on her way to this will reading.

(Cheryl nods sadly. Lawyer tears the paper up. Boss makes a tortured sound.)

HENCHMAN: Don't worry, Boss. Now we've got a clue--we know they're in something.

(Boss jumps up and rushed to the desk.)

BOSS: Give me those!
LAWYER: What? These useless shreds of paper? They're useless, unless you want to know where the jewels were, but why would you?

(Lawyer throws the shreds of paper out the window.)

BOSS: Aah! Why did you do that?
LAWYER: Excuse me?
BOSS: You saw where the jewels were hidden. You saw on the paper. You read to the end of the sentence and you know where they're hidden.
LAWYER: Preposterous!
BOSS: Tell me!
LAWYER: I haven't the faintest--
BOSS: Henchman!

(Henchman, who hasn't been paying attention, in one motion jumps up and throws Lawyer out the window.)

BOSS: Aah! What are you doing?
HENCHMAN: Throwing him out the window like you asked.
BOSS: Not him! One of the women! He knew where the jeweels were! And I didn't even tell you to throw anyone out the window!
HENCHMAN: I guess I just assumed.
CHERYL: Hey! Who are you anyway?
BOSS: I'm...the deceased's business associate. Dunham.
CHERYL: No, I think you're that Jamison.
BOSS: Yeah, yeah, that's it.
CHERYL: The very same Johnston who we just recently discovered was trying to betray our father and get him killed so he could have the jewels for himself?
BOSS: Is that true?
JAMISON: No.
CHERYL: Traitor!

(Henchman throws Boss out the window.)