Hello, TAGgers, Uncle Ned here with an off-topic post you are encouraged to completely ignore. I've received a gracious and very flattering request to post some of the first short chapters of a book I was writing but abandoned about six years ago when my life got busier and anyway, I lost where I was going with the plot. I have maybe 15 short chapters finished, but they are not in any order. These are the opening few. If folks like it and so desire, I can post some others later in the comments section below.
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To Scarecrow. I think I'll miss you most of all.
PROLOGUE
This is the story of my life right now. It isn't pretty, and it isn't interesting, and there's no reason in the world why you should be reading it. But there you are, still reading it. I can tell, because I'm still talking, and in my narrator voice, no less. Clearly, you think I'm being coy about the uninteresting-ness. You will learn. I won't introduce myself now; you'll have plenty of time in the following pages to get to know far more about me than you ever wanted to. I'm not the only one in this story, though. There are other actors in this, rather famous ones like Frustration, Resentment, Complacency, Jealousy and a surprise appearance by Passion, who came out of retirement for this production. There is also more than one actress, though no love scenes. Conscience lent some voice work to this, and the buzz from critics is that Mid-Life Crisis may reprise a previous role. You've only to turn the page, gentle reader, and you've got a ticket; I got you something on the front row.
Did I just use the words, "gentle reader"? Wow, this is going to suck worse than I thought.
CHAPTER 1
I wake up, not to the sound of music, but to the sound of my iPod powering on. It's a tiny electronic "bump" no louder than a mouse fart, but I'm a light sleeper proud of my well-honed Pavlovian responses. The night before, I will have carefully selected just the perfect song to set my morning mood, but now, for the nth morning in a row, I will hit the snooze button before the song even plays. Welcome to Ritual No. 1. Every nine minutes, the electronic rodent will again break wind, and I will stir from under my blanket just long enough to shoot my right arm out with deadly accuracy at the snooze button. Twenty-seven minutes later, without a note of music having escaped its iPrison, I will finally rise to face the day. It is a decision I will regret almost immediately and for most of the next 16-20 hours.
Once vertical, my decrepit ankles broadcast my progress towards the bathroom to the only remaining occupant of the bedroom, an unconscious four year old boy with a face like a cherub. I shall call him "Preston" in this story, though his real name is "Preston." I cast an envious look back at him, snuggled beneath the comforter and clutching a tattered brown doll barely recognizable as a dog, and resist the day's first wave of longing, a desire to dash back across the room, dive back under the comforter and never, ever come out.
This is because I hate my life as I hate myself. I don't have a reason. My life is objectively pretty good, and I wasn’t mistreated as a child or any of the usual drama. They say that on average, 25 percent of the people in this world will just not like you no matter what you do. As luck would have it, I am one of the 25 percent who doesn’t like me. It's just how it goes.
Having passed the morning's first will check, I proceed into the bathroom and begin Ritual No. 2. Don't worry; I'll stop labeling rituals now. I don't want to give the impression that I have anything as defining as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. There are just certain things that I do every morning while on pre-coffee auto-pilot, and the time has now come for the next one: close the bathroom door and turn on the shower to its hottest, to both warm the room and to fog the bathroom mirror as quickly as possible. Of the two people I'm likely to run into at this time of the morning, the one I want to see least is me.
Down at the front door, there is coffee and a lunchbox waiting for me. This was prepared by the other adult in the house, the next in line for people I’d rather not see before I’m caffeinated and braced for the day: the woman I married 14 years ago. Let me set sarcasm aside and say that I really should appreciate the coffee and the lunchbox. There’s no rule that says a wife has to make those for her late-sleeping husband. And I do appreciate on a certain level that she is trying. Marriage counselors, and I’ve seen many – though always alone – talk about each person’s “love language.” The coffee and lunch are her dutiful way of saying, “I love you,” just as her disdain for being in physical proximity with me is her way of saying, “but not like that.” So, I gratefully grab up the offerings and mutter a sincere “thank you” which draws a disembodied “bye” from the kitchen. My right foot stirs the pile of shoes in front of the door looking for my cheap home-to-work sneakers; I slip them on and head out the door.
Don’t ask me how I get to work. There is a car involved, hot coffee and usually four or five songs from iPod #2, nestled snugly into the FM transmitter. What roads I take, how many traffic lights there are, and whether or not I struck any pedestrians are outside the scope of my attention during the journey. And don’t ask me where I work, either. I work in an office, doing administrative and supervisory duties. It could be any office, anywhere, for any type of organization, and honestly what I specifically do has no bearing on the story. What is germane is that I work at a desk right next to a girl. Not just any girl, either. She’s the girl of my dreams. And here she comes.
CHAPTER 2
It’s the beginning of Chapter 2, and I’ve already been deceitful to you. I haven’t outright lied, but I’ve omitted important information from Ritual 1. If I could just impose on you to go back there with me for a moment, I’ll reset the scene: the iPod bumps, the arm comes out for the snooze button, and the brain flashes on Espy, the so-called girl of my dreams. I shall call her “Espy” in this story, though her real name is none of your damn business. I won’t even tell you what secret meaning “Espy” has, only that it does have one, in the hopes of driving you mad with curiosity. And if it does drive you mad, look me up when you get there; I have a timeshare.
“Girl of my dreams” is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose, because I’ve never actually had a dream about Espy, and while she maintains a steady presence throughout the 27 minutes of Ritual 1, that isn’t exactly a dream either. It’s more of a vision, because it’s more photograph than video, and sometimes the photo is just of her eyes and smile, which are the physical components I most associate with her. So, yeah, she’s kind of a Cheshire Cat at six-thirty in the morning.
And now, hurry, come back with me to my office, where all the physical components of Espy are coming through the office door… goddammit! It isn’t her. It’s Whiskey, another female office mate whose real name I’ll take to the grave. And don’t ask me to explain her call sign, Whiskey, either, because… well, frankly it’s just too complicated a concept to go into. Whiskey is young and Californian, with all that goes with those: the energy, the loud voice, the occasionally two-tone worldview. Whiskey and I get along, which is mildly ironic, since I stopped getting along with Whiskey the drink about 18 months ago and haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since, and the irony is compounded by the fact I was out with Whiskey the girl the night I made the decision to stop drinking. We were in a group. We weren’t on a date. I’m married. I digress. Here comes Espy, and with her comes the day’s second wave of longing.
It’s difficult to write about Espy’s arrival at work. To you, outside the sphere of influence, it will seem insignificant, pedestrian, a complete letdown. I doubt Espy herself realizes that the sun follows her around. But to at least a few of us in the office, the time before she saunters in, late as hell and still not dressed for work, is like time spent in uncomfortable theater seats waiting for the show to begin.
I said “us” and I should make it clear I’m not the only person interested in Espy. For years, I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t. Espy is 13 years younger than me – a lifetime, by most accounts – and a southern belle sorority girl graduate from a university with a well-known football program. Espy is also quite pretty, in her way. When it comes to being someone I would consider friendship with, those are strikes one, two and a foul-tip, if you’re scoring along at home.
The strikeout: she was also married when I first met her, and was probably still getting hit on a lot, so she put up what my best friend, Pat, so eloquently refers to as “the bitch shield.” The bitch shield is a force field of attitude that makes it clear you aren’t going to get anywhere, so don’t even try. I don’t begrudge any woman their bitch shield. I employ my own, twisted variant of it myself, except mine is inward-facing, designed to keep my emotional self from sticking to people like Velcro. But I can’t imagine what it must be like to have every guy you try to be friends with sooner or later start sending you flowers and candy and late-night messages on Facebook, even if all you did was make eye contact with them while you talked. Better for all parties, isn’t it, to just nip all that in the bud? To knock all these would-be office Casanovas off the bridge as you charge through the public areas, head down, like the Riders of Rohan sweeping orcs off the bridge in front of Helm’s Deep?
And office life requires some kind of a stance most of the time, regardless of the organization. We spend about 50 percent of our waking, weekday life at the office, so no matter what the rest of our lives are like, the office is its own little petri dish, its own biosphere experiment where all these monkeys in suits try to establish a pecking order, bang out some work, and maybe get laid. Under those conditions, there is such a thing as “pretty enough,” and that’s how I categorized Espy in those days. Even when my wife, who makes one obligatory appearance a year at the office Christmas party, gushed to me about Espy, “isn’t she pretty?” I reflexively replied, “pretty enough for around here,” and glumly went back to gnawing on whatever flavorless cut of meat they tossed in front of us that year.
Pretty enough for around here. Such was the view through two shields, mine and hers.
So, back in the present, the office door is opening and in sweeps Espy, casually late and fuck the world. She is dressed in light jeans and a sweater, and carrying her work clothes on a hangar. She has on no make-up, and her hair, which goes past her shoulder a little, will be thrown into a knot in the back, suitable for travel with a plan for renewed attention in the office bathroom for another half hour. She will generally make a straight shot from the door to her desk to rearrange the stuff in her hand, put down Starbucks if she brought any, and then head out a different door that leads to the bathroom where she can finish getting ready for work.
Just like that, she is here and gone. But something has changed. The fluorescent lights are brighter, the printer beeping like a hypochondriac about a phantom paper jam is more musical, the chirping of the phone on the secretary’s desk is sharper than before. Whiskey, if she arrived before Espy – which is a 50/50 proposition – cheers up now that her best bud is here. I hear her suddenly striking up a conversation in happy tones with Trey, who is enamored with Espy and is young and single enough to do something about it. He, in turn, will suddenly act both elated and nervous, like an actor about to receive his cue. If our distinguished boss is here, even he may come out of his private office to say hello to Espy – when she returns from the bathroom.
Me, I sit this whole time and stare at my computer monitor, deleting most of the emails on which I have been cc:ed, dragging others unread into personal folders on the left side of the screen. My inbox, like my surroundings, must be ordered and organized, and there’s no better time to perform these tasks than Espy’s arrival, the better to keep me from looking up, from giving away the game.
Espy will emerge from the bathroom in uniform – we wear uniforms where I work – and office-level make-up, sort of a “tier 2” daytime look, with tier 1 being how she arrived and tier 3 being her full-blown evening look. I am oblivious to all of this, of course. I know nothing about tiers or how she looks in the evening, I don’t notice what she wears coming to the office or what time she arrives. I couldn’t give a drip whether her hair is up or down or even sideways. I am busy. There are emails to drag and drop. Drag and drop. Drag and drop.
This is the foundation of my relationship with Espy: we find the same things funny, analyze movies and music the same way, and share similar neuroses – especially those relating to neatness and order. Hers is the only desk I’ve ever seen more fanatically straightened and organized than my own. She is also extremely intelligent, has amazing hobbies, and best of all, is an unapologetic geek girl, able to converse about subjects usually reserved for pimply teen boys, subjects like video games, Dungeons and Dragons and geocaching.
While I love talking to Espy as much as anything I am likely to experience on any given day, I will rarely be the one to start the first conversation of a day with her. I mustn’t. Every night, I shake my emotional Etch-a-Sketch; every day I have to redraw the picture of how I relate to people. If Espy is still my friend on any given day, she’s got to grab the big white knobs on left and right and draw me a picture. Anything otherwise would require emotional risk on my part, and I no longer take risks. No sir, not anymore. Not for years. Drag and drop. Drag and drop.
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To Scarecrow. I think I'll miss you most of all.
PROLOGUE
This is the story of my life right now. It isn't pretty, and it isn't interesting, and there's no reason in the world why you should be reading it. But there you are, still reading it. I can tell, because I'm still talking, and in my narrator voice, no less. Clearly, you think I'm being coy about the uninteresting-ness. You will learn. I won't introduce myself now; you'll have plenty of time in the following pages to get to know far more about me than you ever wanted to. I'm not the only one in this story, though. There are other actors in this, rather famous ones like Frustration, Resentment, Complacency, Jealousy and a surprise appearance by Passion, who came out of retirement for this production. There is also more than one actress, though no love scenes. Conscience lent some voice work to this, and the buzz from critics is that Mid-Life Crisis may reprise a previous role. You've only to turn the page, gentle reader, and you've got a ticket; I got you something on the front row.
Did I just use the words, "gentle reader"? Wow, this is going to suck worse than I thought.
CHAPTER 1
I wake up, not to the sound of music, but to the sound of my iPod powering on. It's a tiny electronic "bump" no louder than a mouse fart, but I'm a light sleeper proud of my well-honed Pavlovian responses. The night before, I will have carefully selected just the perfect song to set my morning mood, but now, for the nth morning in a row, I will hit the snooze button before the song even plays. Welcome to Ritual No. 1. Every nine minutes, the electronic rodent will again break wind, and I will stir from under my blanket just long enough to shoot my right arm out with deadly accuracy at the snooze button. Twenty-seven minutes later, without a note of music having escaped its iPrison, I will finally rise to face the day. It is a decision I will regret almost immediately and for most of the next 16-20 hours.
Once vertical, my decrepit ankles broadcast my progress towards the bathroom to the only remaining occupant of the bedroom, an unconscious four year old boy with a face like a cherub. I shall call him "Preston" in this story, though his real name is "Preston." I cast an envious look back at him, snuggled beneath the comforter and clutching a tattered brown doll barely recognizable as a dog, and resist the day's first wave of longing, a desire to dash back across the room, dive back under the comforter and never, ever come out.
This is because I hate my life as I hate myself. I don't have a reason. My life is objectively pretty good, and I wasn’t mistreated as a child or any of the usual drama. They say that on average, 25 percent of the people in this world will just not like you no matter what you do. As luck would have it, I am one of the 25 percent who doesn’t like me. It's just how it goes.
Having passed the morning's first will check, I proceed into the bathroom and begin Ritual No. 2. Don't worry; I'll stop labeling rituals now. I don't want to give the impression that I have anything as defining as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. There are just certain things that I do every morning while on pre-coffee auto-pilot, and the time has now come for the next one: close the bathroom door and turn on the shower to its hottest, to both warm the room and to fog the bathroom mirror as quickly as possible. Of the two people I'm likely to run into at this time of the morning, the one I want to see least is me.
Down at the front door, there is coffee and a lunchbox waiting for me. This was prepared by the other adult in the house, the next in line for people I’d rather not see before I’m caffeinated and braced for the day: the woman I married 14 years ago. Let me set sarcasm aside and say that I really should appreciate the coffee and the lunchbox. There’s no rule that says a wife has to make those for her late-sleeping husband. And I do appreciate on a certain level that she is trying. Marriage counselors, and I’ve seen many – though always alone – talk about each person’s “love language.” The coffee and lunch are her dutiful way of saying, “I love you,” just as her disdain for being in physical proximity with me is her way of saying, “but not like that.” So, I gratefully grab up the offerings and mutter a sincere “thank you” which draws a disembodied “bye” from the kitchen. My right foot stirs the pile of shoes in front of the door looking for my cheap home-to-work sneakers; I slip them on and head out the door.
Don’t ask me how I get to work. There is a car involved, hot coffee and usually four or five songs from iPod #2, nestled snugly into the FM transmitter. What roads I take, how many traffic lights there are, and whether or not I struck any pedestrians are outside the scope of my attention during the journey. And don’t ask me where I work, either. I work in an office, doing administrative and supervisory duties. It could be any office, anywhere, for any type of organization, and honestly what I specifically do has no bearing on the story. What is germane is that I work at a desk right next to a girl. Not just any girl, either. She’s the girl of my dreams. And here she comes.
CHAPTER 2
It’s the beginning of Chapter 2, and I’ve already been deceitful to you. I haven’t outright lied, but I’ve omitted important information from Ritual 1. If I could just impose on you to go back there with me for a moment, I’ll reset the scene: the iPod bumps, the arm comes out for the snooze button, and the brain flashes on Espy, the so-called girl of my dreams. I shall call her “Espy” in this story, though her real name is none of your damn business. I won’t even tell you what secret meaning “Espy” has, only that it does have one, in the hopes of driving you mad with curiosity. And if it does drive you mad, look me up when you get there; I have a timeshare.
“Girl of my dreams” is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose, because I’ve never actually had a dream about Espy, and while she maintains a steady presence throughout the 27 minutes of Ritual 1, that isn’t exactly a dream either. It’s more of a vision, because it’s more photograph than video, and sometimes the photo is just of her eyes and smile, which are the physical components I most associate with her. So, yeah, she’s kind of a Cheshire Cat at six-thirty in the morning.
And now, hurry, come back with me to my office, where all the physical components of Espy are coming through the office door… goddammit! It isn’t her. It’s Whiskey, another female office mate whose real name I’ll take to the grave. And don’t ask me to explain her call sign, Whiskey, either, because… well, frankly it’s just too complicated a concept to go into. Whiskey is young and Californian, with all that goes with those: the energy, the loud voice, the occasionally two-tone worldview. Whiskey and I get along, which is mildly ironic, since I stopped getting along with Whiskey the drink about 18 months ago and haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since, and the irony is compounded by the fact I was out with Whiskey the girl the night I made the decision to stop drinking. We were in a group. We weren’t on a date. I’m married. I digress. Here comes Espy, and with her comes the day’s second wave of longing.
It’s difficult to write about Espy’s arrival at work. To you, outside the sphere of influence, it will seem insignificant, pedestrian, a complete letdown. I doubt Espy herself realizes that the sun follows her around. But to at least a few of us in the office, the time before she saunters in, late as hell and still not dressed for work, is like time spent in uncomfortable theater seats waiting for the show to begin.
I said “us” and I should make it clear I’m not the only person interested in Espy. For years, I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t. Espy is 13 years younger than me – a lifetime, by most accounts – and a southern belle sorority girl graduate from a university with a well-known football program. Espy is also quite pretty, in her way. When it comes to being someone I would consider friendship with, those are strikes one, two and a foul-tip, if you’re scoring along at home.
The strikeout: she was also married when I first met her, and was probably still getting hit on a lot, so she put up what my best friend, Pat, so eloquently refers to as “the bitch shield.” The bitch shield is a force field of attitude that makes it clear you aren’t going to get anywhere, so don’t even try. I don’t begrudge any woman their bitch shield. I employ my own, twisted variant of it myself, except mine is inward-facing, designed to keep my emotional self from sticking to people like Velcro. But I can’t imagine what it must be like to have every guy you try to be friends with sooner or later start sending you flowers and candy and late-night messages on Facebook, even if all you did was make eye contact with them while you talked. Better for all parties, isn’t it, to just nip all that in the bud? To knock all these would-be office Casanovas off the bridge as you charge through the public areas, head down, like the Riders of Rohan sweeping orcs off the bridge in front of Helm’s Deep?
And office life requires some kind of a stance most of the time, regardless of the organization. We spend about 50 percent of our waking, weekday life at the office, so no matter what the rest of our lives are like, the office is its own little petri dish, its own biosphere experiment where all these monkeys in suits try to establish a pecking order, bang out some work, and maybe get laid. Under those conditions, there is such a thing as “pretty enough,” and that’s how I categorized Espy in those days. Even when my wife, who makes one obligatory appearance a year at the office Christmas party, gushed to me about Espy, “isn’t she pretty?” I reflexively replied, “pretty enough for around here,” and glumly went back to gnawing on whatever flavorless cut of meat they tossed in front of us that year.
Pretty enough for around here. Such was the view through two shields, mine and hers.
So, back in the present, the office door is opening and in sweeps Espy, casually late and fuck the world. She is dressed in light jeans and a sweater, and carrying her work clothes on a hangar. She has on no make-up, and her hair, which goes past her shoulder a little, will be thrown into a knot in the back, suitable for travel with a plan for renewed attention in the office bathroom for another half hour. She will generally make a straight shot from the door to her desk to rearrange the stuff in her hand, put down Starbucks if she brought any, and then head out a different door that leads to the bathroom where she can finish getting ready for work.
Just like that, she is here and gone. But something has changed. The fluorescent lights are brighter, the printer beeping like a hypochondriac about a phantom paper jam is more musical, the chirping of the phone on the secretary’s desk is sharper than before. Whiskey, if she arrived before Espy – which is a 50/50 proposition – cheers up now that her best bud is here. I hear her suddenly striking up a conversation in happy tones with Trey, who is enamored with Espy and is young and single enough to do something about it. He, in turn, will suddenly act both elated and nervous, like an actor about to receive his cue. If our distinguished boss is here, even he may come out of his private office to say hello to Espy – when she returns from the bathroom.
Me, I sit this whole time and stare at my computer monitor, deleting most of the emails on which I have been cc:ed, dragging others unread into personal folders on the left side of the screen. My inbox, like my surroundings, must be ordered and organized, and there’s no better time to perform these tasks than Espy’s arrival, the better to keep me from looking up, from giving away the game.
Espy will emerge from the bathroom in uniform – we wear uniforms where I work – and office-level make-up, sort of a “tier 2” daytime look, with tier 1 being how she arrived and tier 3 being her full-blown evening look. I am oblivious to all of this, of course. I know nothing about tiers or how she looks in the evening, I don’t notice what she wears coming to the office or what time she arrives. I couldn’t give a drip whether her hair is up or down or even sideways. I am busy. There are emails to drag and drop. Drag and drop. Drag and drop.
This is the foundation of my relationship with Espy: we find the same things funny, analyze movies and music the same way, and share similar neuroses – especially those relating to neatness and order. Hers is the only desk I’ve ever seen more fanatically straightened and organized than my own. She is also extremely intelligent, has amazing hobbies, and best of all, is an unapologetic geek girl, able to converse about subjects usually reserved for pimply teen boys, subjects like video games, Dungeons and Dragons and geocaching.
While I love talking to Espy as much as anything I am likely to experience on any given day, I will rarely be the one to start the first conversation of a day with her. I mustn’t. Every night, I shake my emotional Etch-a-Sketch; every day I have to redraw the picture of how I relate to people. If Espy is still my friend on any given day, she’s got to grab the big white knobs on left and right and draw me a picture. Anything otherwise would require emotional risk on my part, and I no longer take risks. No sir, not anymore. Not for years. Drag and drop. Drag and drop.
