Monday, December 15, 2003

Say a prayer in the darkness for the magic to come

Here’s the haps:

I’m in the middle of an unexpected three day ‘weekend’. Why? Well…

Those of you who’ve been paying attention (God knows I’ve been trying not to) may remember that I was, in fact, supposed to work yesterday, have today (Monday) off and then work Tuesday and Wednesday, have Thursday off, work Friday, have Saturday off, and then work Sunday as my last day at Village Inn.

Saturday night, a few things became clear to me. One was that the Village Inn Christmas Party is this Friday, and people were exchanging names to do the Secret Santa thing. That all came into focus for me about, oh, 8 in the evening.

Now, I never enjoy office Christmas parties. The people I work with are, for the most part, people I do not associate with voluntarily, and generally (with a few exceptions) wouldn’t. I don’t want to socialize with them, and I don’t want to have a party with them, and I find it horribly embarrassing to force one of them at random (inevitably one of them who sincerely dislikes me) to buy me a cheap $5 gift, and it is especially grating on me to be stuffed into a room with these people and forced to endure artificial holiday cheer with them. So I stayed away from the name drawing (and hope to God no one drew mine, I certainly didn’t put my name into any hat) and started thinking about ways I could make my last work day Thursday and skip the whole party.

I’d about put the finishing touches on a plan in which I’d concoct weekend long family holiday plans that would require me to simply work Tuesday through Thursday, making Thursday my last day, when, well, the second thing came into focus, and I realized that I simply was not going to work for Julie any more.

See, it’s a small thing. Saturday, after a brisk couple of hours between 5 and 7, slacked off again and became very slow. I got caught up and stayed caught up and did a pretty thorough job of my side work… cleaning, namely, and taking trash out… in the back. By the time midnight rolled around, I was pretty well set. By 12:15 pretty much everyone was done with their closing. Julie came back, I told her I was done, she nodded, I told her I was going to get into my dry clothes, she nodded again, I went and did so. When I came back out, Julie had, by using her Kryptonian super power of X-ray vision, dug out from God knows where a couple of plastic bins and one coffee mug that I had overlooked (not deliberately) and wasn’t pleased about that (Julie wants ALL THE WORK DONE before anyone leaves, which I enjoyed when she was on the day shift and making sure the day dishwasher did that, but I enjoy far less when she’s doing it to me, especially over two goddam storage bins and a coffee mug) but she was especially annoyed with me because she’d found a tray with about 20 pieces of flatware in it that I’d run through the dishwasher but not sorted. I’d tucked the tray underneath with the rest of the sorted silverware, after asking several waitresses if I should finish it and being told emphatically NO.

Julie told me, with rather a tone in her voice, that this was NOT to be tolerated, and in fact, she’d found a similar tray I’d left undone last night but had forgotten to mention it to me. She then informed me, in tones of great righteous outrage, that she, herself, with Her Own Managerial Hands, had sorted the silverware and Put It Away Properly.

I just, you know, didn’t say anything. I don’t enjoy being spoken to with a tone by someone ten years my junior whom I personally feel is an incompetent and an ass any more than you would, but, well, I was a week from utter freedom and minutes from temporary liberty, so I just rolled with it.

So I clocked out and we went out front where all the other closers were waiting in the lobby for Julie to unlock the front doors (No One May Leave Until All Work Has Been Checked, is The Law Of Julie) and someone asked “What took so long?” and Julie gave me a truculent glare and sneered derisively, “Ask Darren”.

Now, if you are ever in a position where you are managing me, and you choose to discuss some problem you have with my performance in such a fashion as to embarrass and humiliate me in front of a dozen or so of my fellow employees, well, that is a perfectly valid management decision on your part, and it is very possible that I may need that hypothetical job so much I will meekly come back into work the next day for more abuse.

However, that is not the case with this Village Inn job, so on the walk home I decided calmly to myself that I wasn’t going to work for Julie any more, and yesterday I called Diane up and discussed it with her. Diane is managing Wednesday and Thursday evening this week. So, she had me call in sick yesterday, and I will call in sick tomorrow (today is my scheduled day off) and I’ll work Wednesday and Thursday and that will be that.

Diane informed me that I was not the first one to tell her I wasn’t going to work for Julie any more, so I’m not a pioneer or anything.

Then, yesterday, Paul and Scott were driving into Tampa (sort of, they drove into New Tampa, which is, I grant you, much closer to Zephyrhills than actual Tampa) so they could go to this game store they’d found and enjoyed and look for, well, games. I went along because suddenly I wasn’t working and I wanted to go back into Tampa, which you wouldn’t think someone who has experienced the cosmopolitan pleasures of urban life in utopian Syracuse N.Y. would ever miss, but after six months in Zephyrhills, I find I do. And at the gaming store, I spent FAR TOO MUCH MONEY. Some of it was Utterly Necessary (I found Streets of Fire on DVD, and of course that movie is a Must Have for me; now that I have it and Extreme Prejudice on DVD, I only need The Warriors, 48 Hours, and Johnny Handsome to own all the Walter Hill necessary to any discerning film fan’s collection) but I also, admittedly, added to the damage by buying Dark City (which I like fine and used to own on videotape, but it isn’t a Must Have or anything) and Femme Fatale (which I’d heard was awful and certainly didn’t need, but, well, it was cheap, and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos is supposed to get very nearly naked in it a lot and have at least one make out scene with another woman, so I indulged myself).

From there we repaired to a bookstore (kind of, we searched around New Tampa for a half hour or so looking for one until we finally accepted that all of New Tampa is a literacy free zone, much like Zephyrhills itself, and headed on into Tampa proper, i.e., to Fletcher and Dale Mabry, where a few blocks away from a now defunct Waldenbooks, we found both Borders and Barnes & Noble). There Paul had to buy my Christmas present from him (I don’t know what it is, I stayed out of his way) and I spent what was left of my money on For Us, The Living, the newly discovered, previously unpublished Heinlein novel, and a new paperback copy of RAH’s Time Enough For Love, because the one I’ve owned since high school is falling to pieces.

Then we came home, and I took some of the money I’d sequestered to pay off roving landlords with and Scott took me up to Wal-mart and I got a puny little Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, a tree stand nearly as big as the tree itself, and some groceries to hold us over until Thursday, when Paul gets paid again.

Paul, as expected, stopped sniveling about spending money on Christmas trees we could have spent elsewhere and got totally into decorating the tree as soon as we got it up. He also allowed as to how Streets of Fire was a cool movie, and said he would have checked it out earlier except he always thought it was some dumb skateboarding movie from the 80s. I allowed as to how if he had studied the actual illustrations on the videotape or DVD cover, the picture of Michael Pare in a trenchcoat holding a rifle might have dissuaded him from that peculiar delusion, and, you know, had he ever turned the case over and read the synopsis on the back, that odd preconception would have been banished from his tiny little mind utterly and forever. But still, it was a good day.

Oh, yeah, Paul bought himself Magic: Battlegrounds and he’s currently all about that. I swear, if money allows it, when I’m living alone again I may very well buy myself an X-Box, simply to use as a jukebox… that particular feature is a lovely one. But someone just kick me in the head repeatedly if I ever get as addicted to video games as my baby brother is.

Now, here’s an excerpt from the introduction to For Us, The Living:

”Most authorities are calling this book Robert A. Heinlein’s first novel. I avoid arguing with authorities – it’s usually simpler to shoot them – but I think it is something far more important than that, myself, and infinitely more interesting.
But my disagreement is respectful, and I’m not prepared to dispute the point with sidearms, or even ripe fruit.”

At this point, I was appalled, outraged, and utterly alienated by the brisk, self important, and casually murderous tone of this essay, and I promptly paged ahead to see the signature line, so I would know who had written the fucking thing. Had it been L. Sprague DeCamp or Frederick Pohl, I freely admit, I’d have swallowed my outrage and continued reading, content that such masters would eventually, after such an insane and inflammatory start, bring it back around to being less about them and their own smug self assertiveness regarding the prominence of their own personalities and more about, you know, HEINLEIN. (I would also have been rather bemused, at least, had it turned out to be by DeCamp, because I think, lamentably, that L. Sprague is deceased, which sucks.)

However, my page turning quickly elicited the unwanted and utterly obnoxious intelligence that this pompous preening parody of proper prose was, in fact, the non-work of Spider Robinson, who is, in my opinion, a gaping sphincter of epic proportions. So I read no further, and in fact, if I could rip Spider Robinson’s introduction out without damaging the binding, or simply trade this copy of For Us, The Living in and get one that was not defaced by Robinson’s vile sniggerings, I would do so in a heartbeat. As it is, I’ll just page right on by Robinson’s idiotic drivel whenever I get around to picking this book up for serious perusal, which, since I’m currently rereading The Chronicles of Narnia and have only just begun Prince Caspian, won’t be for a while.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man