The Plate

[I lied. Yesterday's exercise was bad enough that I decided not to be brave and post it, contrary to what I had promised myself. Really, I'm okay with that. Today's exercise will be the last one of this consecutive series of improvised fiction. Thanks for playing. And thanks to Megan for providing the formats. Nicely done.]

Exercise #5: Plate

[Really, that was the format. Just "plate."]

The plate is a warm and happy plate. It sits in a stack of other plates, third from the top, basking in the residual heat left over from the dishwashing it and its friends has just received. The plates do not speak to one another – they are plates, and cannot talk. It waits, expectantly, as the two above it are removed by the chef’s greasy hands and placed on the stainless-steel counter by the grill. The plate wonders if the anticipation of being next might actually be better than it being your turn, but it thinks ahead to the glorious service to the call of dinner that awaits it, and it decides that while being at the front of the line is certainly exciting, actually performing its duties as a plate is a much more fulfilling moment in its daily life. Mainly, though, it thinks this:

I love being a plate. I love the roundness of my shape, the solidity and weight of my construction. I love the tiny, unique chip on my underside but also the perfect sterile whiteness of my eating surface. I love being a working plate, simple and sturdy, a plate for the people, instead of an overdesigned, thin, effete plate at a snotty restaurant. I love the dark, scalding cleanliness of the dishwasher, and the poised orderliness of being one of many plates in a tall, symmetrical stack awaiting the beginning of the dinner rush. I love the solitary slow afternoons when the lunch crowd has gone, and I have a chance at being the lone plate in use, serving a sole diner who has wandered in for a 3 p.m. meal. I love the sizzle of burgers on the grill, the rumbling crackle of fries in the fryer, and the smell of the disinfectant that cleans the counters. It is good that I do not have a face, because the joy of being a plate is so strong that I would smile and crack myself. I love being a plate.

And suddenly, it is time. With one hand, the cook grabs the plate and the one underneath it while raising the fry basket out of the hot oil with the other hand. The plate nearly vibrates with excitement. A fresh load of hot fries are dumped on it, followed by the bottom half of a toasted hamburger bun, two patties dripping with melted cheese, and the top of the bun. A long slice of pickle is added, a pungent garnish that the plate initially hated, but years of familiarity with the wedge have bred not contempt but acceptance and love. Covered in food and reaching a fever pitch of joy, the plate is set up in the window underneath the blinding heat lamps, right next to the plate that had been underneath it, but before it can enjoy the weird, all-encompassing orange light for long, it is snatched by the waitress, who turns, one plate in each hand, and moves swiftly out of the kitchen and into the dining area.

The plate, whose soul is positively singing at this, the moment of its penultimate happiness, passes the lunch counter, where a row of people are crammed onto the stools, hunched, eating, reading newspapers or staring blankly at their food. In the waitresses’ hands it rounds the corner by the cash register, awaiting the moment when it will come to rest on a hard Formica table top, be readjusted by the diner to the correct eating position, salted and ketchuped, and fulfill its ultimate purpose of providing food. The plate’s contentment with its role in the universe is immeasurable.

The waitress turns the final corner, bearing down on the awaiting diners, but just before she reaches their table, a careless child dashes out in her path and runs squarely into her legs. She reaches out a hand to stop herself from falling, and lets go of the plate. It is launched terrifingly into midair, its cheeseburger, fries, and pickle tumbling away into empty space, the hard tile floor rushing dizzily upwards.

The plate, spinning end over end in the slow-motion clarity of sudden catastrophe, is not afraid. It is thinking this:

I am strong. My construction is solid, and my spirit is unbreakable. The joy of my life will keep me whole. I am simple, true, and pure. I bring food. I am a plate.

Gerald Quits

[Again, I'm going to post the format first. This one was hard. And just so you know, in an act of true bravery for a semi-control freak such as myself, I'm not rereading these even once before I post them.]

Format: Have an imaginary lunch with you and two people from your life. One person stands up and says "And now I'm done with all that." This is the most dramatic thing he/she has ever said. Now see what happens after that; how you all react. "That" can be whatever you want. Just decide that it is huuuuge.

“And now I’m done with all that.”

Gerald has pushed back his chair and is standing up, his hands gripping the edge of the table at the lunch café. Liz and I are staring at him in disbelief. This is more emphatic than either of us have seen him behave by about a factor of one hundred. It is lunch time at the café, and people are staring.

“Okay, Gerald, it’s okay, we believe you.” Liz, apparently is going to try to placate him. “Just sit down and let’s talk about this some more.”

“I....am just fine standing.” Gerald is shaking slightly, like a kid who just jumped out of the swimming pool and into a cool breeze. If he weren’t hanging on to the table, he might jitter right across the café, propelled by anxious vibrations.

For my part, I am completely stunned. I don’t know Gerald that well, but when he, Liz and I happened to arrive at the café at the same time, the only socially acceptable option was that we eat lunch together. You can’t sit five feet away from someone in your graduate program and pretend they’re not there. I had anticipated the typical problem, which is that Gerald is a conversation vacuum. Through a perfect storm of one-word responses, nods, and obscure tangents, he possesses the ability to kill any conversation. It’s not just that you can’t hold a conversation with him, it’s that his presence literally sucks the life out of any other discussion you might have been having before he arrived. So I sat down prepared to eat my turkey sandwich as quickly as possible so as to spend minimal time in the verbal black hole. I’m pretty sure that Liz is on board with this approach, because she had bought an orange for lunch and that was it. I had the sneaking suspicion that she was going to claim a 12:30 meeting and eject early, leaving me to go it along. Ruthless tactic, yes, but completely understandable.

And then, out of the blue, it turned out that Gerald had a lot to say. And he had said it all to us, in a stretched, quavering voice that was clearly not well-trained to carry a great deal of emotion. And now, this conversation-killing, barely-existent, wall-flower of a Canadian graduate student was standing in the middle of a crowded restaurant and calling down quite a lot of attention upon himself.

Liz tries a different tactic. “But you’ve been working on your dissertation for how many years now?”

“Five” snaps Gerald, and then sighs. “Five. But I’ll do it. I’ll leave. He doesn’t think I will, but I will. I’ll go. I’ll just go.”

“Gerald,” I offer, my mind finally wrapping itself around the situation, “why can’t you just write your dissertation on another topic?”

“I told you. I want to write about Canadian theatre. Canadian Theatre is what I want to write about. That is the reason that I came here.”

“Well,” I counter, “not just Canadian theater, but one admittedly obscure Canadian theatre director who directed one play that wasn’t terribly popular, right?” It suddenly occurs to me that this has become some sort of social experiment. I’ve never met anyone like Gerald in my life, and I’ve just decided to push his buttons a little and see what makes him tick. Liz is looking at me with a fresh expression of shock. I am usually not such a bastard, but the idea has seized me and it won’t let go. “I mean, okay, right, we are all pretty obscure, writing book-length papers on the history of theatre, but, well, you’ve had this coming for a long time. Dr. Garner has been trying to steer you gently towards anything that was even remotely relevant, but you were just stuck on this one guy – what’s his name?”

“Bruce...Malarkey,” spits Gerald, “and the play was performed once annually for twenty years in a row, so it is not obscure. It was a holiday tradition in Saskatoon.” He is really about to lose it, but I’m not sure if losing it will involve a breakdown or an explosion. Really, where is this need to find out coming from? Who knows, but it’s there. I press on.

“And this threat to give up theatre altogether? To chuck it all? Couldn’t you just transfer to a program where the faculty would be more open to your ideas? Aren’t you being a tiny bit melodramatic?”

At this point Liz is just sitting back and watching. I suspect that I’m making the situation even more uncomfortable for her than it already is, but hell, she’ll have a funny story to tell people.

“I have invested far too great a deal of my time and energy into my project at this university. I am so angered by the faculty’s decision to require that I discontinue my research and find a new topic, that I am ready to completely abandon my career in protest.”

“In protest?” I am going to hell. Please, somebody shut me up. “What could you possibly be protesting? What are you going to do with your life? You’re almost thirty, and you have no marketable skills whatsoever in any area outside of theatre academia.”

“Guys, could we possibly talk about this outside, or later, or never?” Liz is making a last ditch effort to salvage the situation. Gerald, however, is having none of it. His voice reaches a new level of pinched strain. His left hand has detached from the table and is now viciously squeezing his worn army-green canvas book bag, which is slung over the chair.

“Sometimes there are injustices that must be protested. There are things that have to be – there are confrontations that have to be confronted. And done. Things must be done, and if I have to be the one to do them, then that is how it will be.”

So it looks like a breakdown, not an explosion. His syntax is deteriorating, his other hand is losing its grip on the table, and he’s really shaking now. I should probably back off.

“Why did you pick that topic in the first place, anyway? I mean, right, so you’re from Canada, but I’m from Indiana and I’m not trying to write about Hoosier theatre.” I fire back. I make a mental note to ask Liz to punch me in the stomach after this is over.

“I already explained....earlier....my parents...were in...a production....of.....the....” He can’t finish, but to my surprise, he’s not going to slump defeated down into the chair. Instead, he manages to turn and walk the thirty feet to the café exit. He is shaking so badly that he can barely move, and bumps blindly into two girls who come in the door as he tries to leave. His backpack and coat are still draped over the chair at our table.

“When,” I ask Liz as Gerald staggers out of view, “did I become such a bad person?”

How To Take A Twenty Minute Break

1. Have a sister who works part-time at a catalog photography company.

2. Have the photo guy at the catalog company need to photograph a golf bag, and be sure he wants to check the size of the bag in relation to a person.

3. Have him photograph your sister with the bag, then Photoshop the image onto a golf course background.

4. Have the two of them, bored at work, decide to expand her head size just slightly:


5. When she e-mails you the photo, find it extremely funny.

6. Spend the next fifteen minutes using Photoshop to make it a family portrait, adding in pictures of yourself and your brother:

7. Okay, back to work.

Reg Puts His Foot Down

[This may be cheating, but because of the very specific nature of this particular exercise, I'm going to post the format provided to me by my outside source. Normally I would just post the results, but this will save a lot of exposition.]

Ye format: Write a conversation between two elves at work. They are everyday elves we have never heard of before (like the elves in the ATM) NOT the elves in the North Pole. Whatever kind of elf they are is up to you, but this is just an average day at work. They can be between 3 and 28 inches tall. At some point, their lives change forever. This is the day that big thing happened.

Reg: (climbing into the ice storage bin of a commercial soda fountain): Morning, Rod. (Looking at the stack of ice cubes on Rod's side of the bin) You get here early?

Rod: Well, somebody’s got to stack and prepare these ice cubes before the lunch rush, and if I’m counting on you to be late, then I’ve got to be early. It’s 9:15, you know.

Reg: Oh, for god’s sake...

Rod: No, not for God’s sake. I’m tired of it.

Reg: Listen, okay, it’s not like people will lose their lives if they don’t get ice.

Rod: No, they won’t, but we will lose our jobs.

Reg: Our jobs? What the hell are you talking about? Nobody knows we’re even in here. They think that some stupid mechanical device causes the ice to pour out of the soda fountain when they hit the lever. We don’t exist, literally, as far as they’re concerned.

Rod: Well, if we don’t keep the ice coming, then there will be a service call, and the big hairy guy with the flashlight and the electric screwdriver is going to come poking around here again, and we’re going to have to spend three hours hiding up the ice chute and dodging that metal thingy he sticks up it when he thinks its jammed. One of the guys who works over at Sbarro had his leg broken on the last service call. He was in a cast for a month, they had to stick some unprepared trainee in his bin with him, it was a disaster!

Reg: You know what, forget it. I’m so done with this shit. I want some recognition. Let the service guy come. I’m not hiding any more. I’m going to stand right here in the middle of the ice bin and dance around in my tiny track shoes and my tiny work overalls and give that ass head a freaking coronary. His flashlight can be the spotlight to my debut performance.

(There is a click, followed by a loud grinding sound)

Rod: (scrambling about, gathering ice cubes and throwing them through the ice chute, which is far above his head) Reg! Now is not the time for your empty idealism! The manager is getting his morning Seirra Mist! Now help me fill his cup!

Reg: (not moving) No, I’m not kidding this time. I’m tired of being taken for granted, everyone walking around thinking that what we do, our craft, our livelihood – no, let’s call it what it is – our ART, dammit, is simply the random, mindless tumbling of some inanimate device that two soda fountain engineers dreamed up thirty years ago!

(The grinding sound stops momentarily, then restarts, then stops, then restarts again, the inside of the ice bin shaking back and forth each time. From outside, the manager’s voice is heard, saying “This thing is slow this morning.”)

Rod: (still desperately grabbing at cubes) Reg! You can’t do this to me! Not today!

Reg: Roddy, my boy, it’s got nothing to do with you. I am striking a blow for all elf-kind today. No longer do we work in the dark. No longer will the miniature proletariat...

(The sound of his voice is drowned out by the deafening “woosh” of the Sierra Mist being jetted into the manager’s cup.)

Rod: You can not do this! They’ll kick you out of the union! You’ll have to go back to unskilled Elfing! Do you want that? Do you want to spend the rest of your life roaming around the woods polishing lightning bugs for minimum wage?

Reg: Hey, it’s not like we’re making a fortune running around in the dark chucking ice cubes into a hole. Those Keebler bastards have got the right idea – publicity, ad deals, probably got a nice tree in Malibu...

Rod: It’s not a bed of roses, you know. The Keeblers have had their share of problems, Reg. Fame can be hard.

Reg: Oh, what, you have to go to rehab once every couple of years? So what? At least people know what they do! At least people know who they are!

Rod: Reg, people think they’re cartoons!

Reg: Well, in a little bit, there will be no mistaking it. One that furry beast of a repair-man looks in here and sees me, it’s all going to change. The time has come. In fact, let’s get this show on the road right now. (He unzips his work overalls and starts peeing on the stack of ice cubes on his side of the bin.)

Rod: Reg, no! The kid won’t dump more ice in here for another two hours!

Reg: (really hosing down the ice cubes) Exactly! Next person who wants ice is getting my own special brand!

(The click and loud grinding sound are heard again. Reg zips up, grabs the tainted cubes, and starts throwing them into the chute. Rod tries to stop him, but Reg threatens him with a melting, yellow cube, and Rod backs off, resigned to their fate. After Reg has thrown all of his cubes into the chute and the rush of the soda dispenser has come and gone, he walks over to Rod who is sitting on an ice cube, head in his hands.)

Reg: Trust me, buddy. We’re going places now. You’ll be able to tell your kids one day that you were here. You saw history being made. It’s a brave new world, Roddy boy.

Dave Himelfarb Sneezes

[The following is the first of five days of improvised ten-minute fiction writings. Some structure is being provided by an outside source - a detail or two from which to begin. I was going to write them all first and then post only the ones that I thought were good, but part of the idea here is to kill your inner critic, and one way to do that is to just post all five entries right after I finish them. This means that there will be no proofreading of any kind. As always, if you are unsatisfied with the quality of the work, you will receive a full refund.]

It is a slow day at Himelfarb and Grotsky Billiard and Gaming Warehouse. Co-owner Dave Himelfarb is staring into the glass case containing a wide variety of poker chip sets and cases, the prices for which have all been marked down substantially in the last six months as the Texas Hold ‘Em craze has faded somewhat. After all, once every trend-sheep in the city has purchased a set of poker chips, why would they need to buy more? Dave is staring at one particular case containing a 1000-piece deluxe set whose neatly printed original price of $199 has been crossed out and rewritten by a reckless, almost illegible hand in red marker. The new price is an absurd $79, which Dave knows is well below the store’s original cost for the set, but his partner in business, Herman Grotsky, has decided that such markdowns are necessary to move inventory. Herman is thirty years Dave’s senior, having founded the company in 1968 with Dave’s father, who died of a heart attack eight months ago. Herman’s handwriting bothers Dave almost more than his ridiculous business sense. Instead of “Marked Down! Final Clearance!” the price tag on the poker set appears to read “Marfed Dog! Finger Clap!” Dave breaks the stare and finds that droplets of sweat have appeared on his forehead and that he is breathing heavily. He stalks off to the employee bathroom at the back of the store to splash some water on his face. In the bathroom mirror, Dave considers himself. Substantially overweight at age thirty-five, he is clearly headed down the Himelfarb family path of obesity, stress, and early death. “Fantastic,” he says to his reflection. Aside from the substantial paunch, Dave’s appearance is nearly immaculate. His wrinkle-free khakis are perfectly creased down the front of each leg, the cuffs ironed to a razor-sharp edge above his brilliantly polished brown shoes. His Himelfarb and Grotsky embroidered golf shirt is similarly attended to, with nary a stain or wrinkle to be detected anywhere. His thick moustache is trimmed to perfection. If it were 1895, Dave would be a compulsive purchaser of moustache wax, but today’s moustache fashions would render such a choice far too eccentric, so Dave relies on five or six different trimming tools, the most precise being a pair of fingernail clippers. On impulse, he opens the medicine cabinet in the employee bathroom, pulls out his work-only fingernail clippers, and makes a few micro-trimming adjustments to the moustache. As he replaces the clippers, the draft created by the closing medicine cabinet door launches a cloud of dust from the top of the cabinet into the air. The dust falls into Dave’s eyes, and he explodes in a sudden and violent sneeze. Staring again at himself through the mirror, now blurry with snot and saliva, Dave realizes that the entire bathroom is filthy. Herman has not hired a new woman to clean the back of the store, having fired the previous cleaning lady last week because she didn’t speak enough English to carry on the endless, rambling conversations about county politics and minor league baseball that Herman attempted to make with her as she worked, the same mindless banter that Herman had dumped on their previous cleaning woman, a staggeringly tiny old woman named Marge Higgenbotham who had died on the job three years prior, succumbing to a massive stroke while dusting the softball trophies in Herman’s office. Dave finds himself in a deep and wordless fury. He stalks back to the glass case, opens it, takes the price tag carefully off of the poker chip set, wads it up, throws it on the floor, and stomps on it seven times with his shoe.

Why You Should Vacation In Boca Raton, But Only If You Are A Certain Type Of Person

A number of years ago, I made the quite unexpected decision to move to Boca Raton, Florida. I wasn’t doing much at the time, and there was a certain person in my life whose company was well worth following to the beach. During our nine months in Boca, she and I stumbled upon a Big Life Truth, the kind of philosophical certainty that can serve as a guidepost for a lifetime. That revelation was this: Southeast Florida is perhaps the most deeply insane region in this country. The madnesses which populate the narrow strip of civilization running from West Palm Beach to Key West are of a wild variety and sun-baked intensity unparalleled in my experience. It was my time in Boca that inspired my theory of Winter the Assassin and Warm Weather Insanity, as detailed here.

Upon returning to the Midwest, we were initially relieved to have stepped back to a much more understated level of insanity, but after a few years, the bizarre lure of Boca called us back, if only for vacation-length periods of time. In January, we embarked on our fourth Boca Raton winter pilgrimage in the last four years (the tropical location from which I watched the NFL Playoff Game Which Shall Not Be Named). It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy the unusual mix of peaceful beaches, insane residents, absurd wealth, and great eating, and if you are that person, you should definitely go and enjoy these, the ingredients that make up the mad mad sandbox of Southeast Florida:

1. The People.
Boca Raton is a people-watcher’s Garden of Eden. If you take pleasure from observing the constant comedy that is the General Public, then you’ll love watching the behavior of and interaction between the three major population demographics:

The Miserably Retired:
Using only your facial muscles, stretch the corners of your mouth down and outwards in an expression of displeasure. Maintain this expression for thirty years, and you will have achieved the basic facial appearance of the multitude of retired New Yorkers who populate Boca Raton. Now add a thick east coast accent, a mid-level Mercedes sedan, a half-million dollar condo, and an inexplicable sense of deep discontent with every aspect of the universe, and you are ready to move to Boca! Go to nice restaurants, split a hamburger, and tip miserably! Walk on the beach in dress socks and sandals, bemoaning the heat! Dispose of the words “thank you” and the emotion gratitude! And, most importantly, when the idealistic manager of your local Whole Foods decides to not only put out a complaints box but to post the complaints and his responses to them on a bulletin board, make sure that there is never a square inch of that board showing! Plaster that sucker with angrily scribbled rants such as, no kidding, “All of your food is TOO SPICY!!! I can’t eat anything, it’s TOO HOT!!! And your prices are going up too fast! Five months ago soup was $3.89 and now it’s $4.09!!!”

The Beautiful People
This one is easy. If you’re a man, make more money than God, usually in investment banking. Be single at age forty-five, drive a car costing slightly less than the gross national product of Ecuador, wear a watch that costs five figures, spend hundreds on expensive tequila, tan a lot, and ignore the ugly people. If you’re a woman, cut and color, lipo, implant silicone, get a nose job and face lift, tan tan tan, shop exclusively at Bebe, be staggeringly dumb but with an attitude, and sleep with the aforementioned men so they can fund your self-mannequinization. Also ignore the ugly people.

The Immigrants
Come to America, get a job in the service industry, make twenty times what you made in your home country, and get abused by the Miserably Retired and ignored by the Beautiful People. The only rational reaction to this, of course, is not to give a rip shit about the quality of your work (which is sometimes great and sometimes hilariously neglectful), because it’s going to be derided or ignored pretty much no matter what you do, so you’d better develop some thick skin.

Take these three demographics, add them liberally to a Boca Raton beach, restaurant, or grocery store, shake well, and there are endless moments of entertainment, if you like that sort of thing.

2. Driving.
I don’t know why there are so many roller coaster-filled theme parks in Florida, because the highways are much more exciting. On our recent visit, we were on I-95 for no more than ninety seconds before a brand new Ferrari F360 Sypder passed us going at least 105. Because the Miserably Retired are going fifty-seven in the carpool lane (and randomly dispersed throughout of the other lanes), he was going 105 in an insane, gas-brake-gas, zig-zag manner, tailgating and swearing a lot. This is completely normal. The F360 Spyder could just as easily have been a beat-up Chevy pickup filled with landscaping equipment, although the Chevy’s exhaust tends to contain a bit more oil smoke.

If you do survive the highways, be very careful navigating the side streets, because they are designed, casino-like, to trap innocent drivers who can’t tell the difference between Southwest 2nd Terrace, Southwest 2nd Street, and Southwest 2nd Court, all of which are within five hundred yards of each other. And two of them intersect. And one of them is not a court, despite its name. You must therefore drive offensively and stay on the main roads, which is a nice challenge, if you like that sort of thing.

3. The Opulence.
Boca Raton is absolutely dripping with ostentatiously spent cash. The city itself is immaculately manicured, with palm trees and parks and cool South Florida architecture everywhere you go:

The people, as you might have gathered, are pretty well off, and they expect to be treated as such. There is valet parking everywhere. Everywhere: At the grocery store. At the movie theatre. And, of course, at the upscale outdoor mall, Mizner Park, where the valets send the boring Cadillacs and BMWs off to the parking garage but leave three or four especially shiny cars sitting by the valet stand for everyone to see. On this latest trip, we drove by the Mizner valet stand at about 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon and saw, lined up neatly bumper-to-bumper, an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish, a Lamborghini Diablo, and Ferrari 575 Maranello. This is a mall, a car show, a fashion show, and a dog-and-pony show. This is also completely normal, and extremely entertaining, if you like that sort of thing.

4. The Eating
The aged and the wealthy sure don’t do a lot of home cooking, so the concentration and variety of restaurants in Boca Raton is pretty well off the charts. Food from all around the world is available at an excellent variety of unique, non-chain eateries. I recommend Max’s Grille in Mizner Park, not just because I worked there, but also because the food is nothing short of ridiculous. Ask for a table outside by the fountain, enjoy the warm night air and bustle of the dinner hour in Mizner, and order the Pistachio-Crusted Grouper with Wasabi Smashed Sweet Potatoes. If, of course, you like that sort of thing.

5. The Sun and Sand.
There is something to be said for walking outside in mid-January and not having to brace yourself for the soul-tearing wind, and Boca Raton is a good place to go if you need a break from winter. As advertised, the sun shines constantly, the breezes are balmy, the humidity is low, and the temperature – average January high: seventy-six degrees – is perfect (Well, perfect in the winter. Summer is slightly cooler than fire.) The beaches are just what you’d expect from South Florida: sky-blue water, soft sand, fluttering palms, and an assortment of the aforementioned General Public. Add a spectacular ocean-side jogging trail and some beachfront restaurants, and Boca Raton on the Atlantic is a delightful and relaxing place to sit on a beach chair and read a good book. If you don’t like that sort of thing, then why are you still reading?


As you might have possibly gathered, the Boca Raton beach vacation is not for everyone. Personally, I love it, and I can’t wait to go back next year. The weather is utterly relaxing, the food is unbelievable, the beaches are splendid, and the populace is guaranteed to provide a healthy dose of human comedy. I also love a quiet, nature-filled vacation on a regular basis, but variety is an important thing. So go, you food lovers, you people watchers, you January tanners, go to Boca Raton and enjoy the beautiful insanity of South Florida.

Milestone

I like milestones. The passage of time can get downright blurry, and milestones are the perfect way to divide that time and bring certain portions of it into focus. Yes, divisions such as seasons, semesters, or 525,600-minute increments are largely arbitrary, but life’s tireless forward momentum requires some artificial boundaries to break it up, or else the blurriness can degrade into outright monotony. It is good to be able to look back and think, “How did this [arbitrary segmentation of life] go?” Then you can get out the yardsticks and vernier calipers and telescopes and mass spectrometers and really do some serious self-assessing.

On a completely related note, The Yellow Shirt opened for business one year ago today. (Fweeeee!) I’m feeling a bit retrospective, as you might imagine. I’m feeling a bit listy as well, so I offer you, in seemingly random but possibly very particular order, the following Things That Are True After Year One:

1. Year One of The Yellow Shirt consisted of a seventy-one posts, totaling a little over 47,000 words. For those of you who are accustomed to the college paper format of double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font (about 310 words per page), that comes to about 151 pages. Fortunately for my sense of life-shaped irony, this is substantially shorter than a dissertation.

2. As of 12:01 a.m. on March 9, The Yellow Shirt has recorded a total of 2,636 hits. This number is, unfortunately, totally meaningless, as I don’t remember when I put the hit counter on the site. I think it was sometime in October. As a representative sampling, there have been 618 hits in the last thirty days, but given the amount of would-be spammers roaming around, this number is also unreliable. Plus, 80% of these are just me staring at the site and hitting “refresh” as fast as my finger can click. Yes, I admit, I am the Barry Bonds of web hit statistics. In any event, it’s nice to know that people are checking in.

3. A key bottom-line accomplishment of Year One is that the site has remained consistently active. This project had every chance of being one of those ventures which are launched and initially pursued with great fervor but then abandoned when the energy of newness wears off. To be sure, I’ve had some fits and starts (five posts total in August and September, eek), and not everything has been maintained with equal vigor (hello, links), but I’m still going, and that’s the most important thing.

4. As far as my internet-shared life goes, this milestone allows me to take a look and see that I’ve had a pretty interesting year. I started a blog, backpacked in Michigan, lost my car to suicide, directed a play, saw the Super Bowl up close, sat on the beach in Boca Raton (post forthcoming), and rode in an elevator with Joe Theismann. Not a bad twelve months.

5. Mainly, I am pleased that after a year’s worth of work, The Yellow Shirt has consistently represented who I am as a person, or at least the parts of me that I feel ought to be shared with an unknown number of people who might or might not know me. Honest self-representation is a tricky thing in any public form.

6. I am extremely happy that the good people at Blogger have finally gotten around to putting up spam protection on the commenting. So every time you have to type in “S5DY8” or similar before you post a comment, remember that it's so you’ll never have to hear about Michael Jackson’s Plastic Surgery Blog again.

7. I will, really, seriously, no kidding, pinky swear, be writing the sequel to The Bus, Part I within 30 days of right now. This promise goes out to one reader in particular who has, through channels, communicated to me her dire need to hear the end of that story, an end which, at this point, is far too over-anticipated to ever possibly live up to the hype.

In the interests of maintaining the frequently overlooked first post goal of trying to remember that brevity is wit, I will wrap up this navel-gazing with a tribute to everyone who has taken the time to comment on any of the silliness posted hereon. In honor of your efforts, I offer you my five favorite comments of Year One, in no particular order (told you I was feeling listy):

1. In reply to Winter the Assassin and Warm Weather Insanity, Megan said:

I think your post is stupid.
I hate winter snobbery. You are not a martyr for me, Tyler. Not for me.
CALIFORNIA FOREVEIA. YAY CALIFORNIA! ESCAPE YOU FOOLS! ESCAPE!
I Spent Six Years Becoming a Person Who Says "awesome, it's 12 degrees" And Really Meant it And Went To Work In That Weather, and I remained empty.
Good Day.
(I have had a very fun time calling your post stupid.)
I would like to note that Tyler is terrific. But his post is still, seriously, very stupid. (seriously, call me stupid. this is fun.)

2. Wyatt added the following category to Buicks and Other Road Hazards:

Tyler, you forgot to mention the people who drive "lux cars for the young and snotty" - any sedan or coupe from a non-American manufacturer (see the BMW 5's, Infinity M's) and any "sport ute" by a lux maker. These people have 1 thing in common - the firmly held belief that their ability to afford $500+ lease payments entitles them to drive any way they please. These people are either driving 50 on the highway because they are having problems with their blue-tooth sync and dicking with their navigation systems, or driving 50 through downtown because their time is too valuable to bother with things like "right-of-way."

3. Guy Fawkes had this semi-soothing bit of perspective regarding My Car Committed Suicide:

Tyler, you should be happy your car did not try to kill itself while you were in it. Your car has chosen its own path. Let it go. If you try and raise it, then you are no better than those people holding signs outside the hospital saying that Terry Schiavo came to them in a dream and told them she wanted to live. I have only one word for you. It is an ancient word. It comes from the Latin “imgonnagityousucka.” It is to be spoken with care. Use it together. Use it in peace. Here is that word: karma.

[Good call, Guy. For the record, I did decide to let the poor thing die.]

4. Anonymous made a guess as to the identity of the mystery athletes (and possibly a well-placed jab at the overzealous photography) in Access:

Clearly, the two men in the middle of the fourteenth photograph from the top are D. "Dee" Brown and Sean "I Will Probably Change My Name At Least Three More Times Before My Career Fizzles Out" Combs. Also, possibly, they're not.

5. And finally, when I asked for captions to the last photograph in Yet Even More Small Things, I received a few submissions (all of which were excellent, especially Megan’s “Dog day night”), and then was spammed with the following comment:

howardharolds47564951 said...
I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive, you may find My Blog interesting. So please Click Here To Read My Blog http://pennystockinvestment.blogspot.com

To which Jeff replied:
Harold!!! That doesn't make any sense! It is a dog driving a car. Why would he want us to read your blog?!?! Wait...in brainstorming there are no bad ideas. I apologize to you howardharolds, perhaps the dog is saying just that.

Thanks everyone for your contributions and keep up the good work. Remember: every time you comment on The Yellow Shirt, an orphan gets a new puppy. And don’t worry, it’s a different orphan each time, so one kid isn’t hoarding them or having to deal with multiple vet bills.

And finally, since it’s my retrospective and I’ll list if I want to, here are some forthcoming posts, again and always, in no particular order:

1. Why You Should Vacation In Boca Raton, Florida, But Only If You Are A Certain Type Of Person

2. Book recommendations: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and Love Monkey by Kyle Smith.

3. The Bus, Part II, At Long Damn Last

4. New Feature! New Feature! Wee Hah! I’ve enjoyed the ten minute writings, and I’m going to shift them a bit to get back to my fiction-writing roots. I’m going to try a series of ten minute improvised fiction writings. No forethought, no planning, just an attempt to kill the inner critic and see what comes out in fiction form. I have no idea what this might yield, but it’s worth finding out.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, and hopefully you’ll keep coming back. All manner of feedback on Year One is welcome, unless it’s negative, in which case I will delete it, shut down the site, move to Eureka, California and become an herbal therapist who lives in a bio-friendly house with no electricity.

Photography

At certain moments in life, the mind takes snapshots. Sometimes these perfectly captured images are appropriately significant - the breathtaking expanse that spills out before me as I snowboard on the Nevada side of Heavenly Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe, the alpine green and white landscape of the mountain giving way to the flat brown desert miles away - and sometimes they are moments of no apparent importance whatsoever. This is a description of one of the latter.

It is one o'clock on a blindingly sunny March Saturday, but the sun's high angle prevents any direct rays from intruding into the kitchen of my mother's house. My mom is standing at the kitchen sink, her head turned to the right as she speaks to me across the kitchen. Her hands are dripping wet, and she holds them loosely and at an odd angle in front of her and just above the white porcelain edge of the farm sink, pausing in her actions the way she does when she has a particular point to make. The expression on her face is not one of any great conviction, but rather of a straightforward statement of fact. There is a green and white towel sitting within her reach on the white countertop, but she is not moving for it. Instead, she is making her point. I am looking at her, but also through the kitchen window at the neighbor's dog. The dog, a footstool-esque breed named Bailey, is about two hundred yards away, but through a coincidence of perspective and sightlines, he appears in miniature about three inches above my mom's left shoulder. He is staring intently up the trunk of a large oak, and is in mid-yap, having apparently treed some hapless squirrel.

I have absolutely no idea why my brain chose this moment, but there it is, ingrained forever, and now doubly ingrained for the reconsideration. I can't even remember what she was saying to me, probably because I was distracted by the dog. The brain is very mysterious, this I know.


And, on a completely unrelated note, since the Oscars were tonight, I thought I'd post British actor Peter O'Toole's 2003 acceptance speech for his Honorary Oscar recognizing his life's work, for which he was nominated seven times but never won. I was sufficiently impressed by it that I tracked it down and saved the text. It is a spectacular example of the genre: witty, gracious, and true, saying quite a bit with only a few words. It was also enhanced in the delivery by his ridiculously dignified accent. Enjoy:

Meryl Streep, members of the Academy, distinguished guests, viewers, ladies and gentlemen — always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot. I have my very own Oscar now to be with me till death do us part. I wish the Academy to know that I am as delighted as I am honored, and I am honored. The magic of the movies enraptured me when I was a child. As I totter into antiquity, movie magic enraptures me still. Having already bagged this baby, as it were, and so spared uncertainties prior to the opening of an envelope, I'm able to think. I think of our colleagues, our old friends now gone, who played their parts in this ceremony. I think of the sumptuous talents alive and well and with us now. I think of the astonishing, the gifted and able young men and women who I meet practically every time I go to work, and from whom I grab energy in handfuls. I think of the United States and of the loves and friendships I've known here for more than half a century, and of how much the nation has given to me both personally, privately and professionally. And I am deeply thankful. And now, at this last, you have given me this delightful shock. You're very good. Good night and God bless you.

Tick Tock

For whatever reason, I still have no concept of time whatsoever when it comes to almost any attempt at guessing how long it will take to accomplish one or several tasks. This is quite strange, because I have an internal clock that operates with uncanny accuracy. However, while I can usually tell you exactly what time of the day it is, I cannot figure out how the events of that day will or won't fit into the time remaining. This goes for large periods of time (for instance, the summer I built a second-story deck on the back of my mom's house, the completion date of which I misestimated by about a month) as well as the more basic "tasks in a given day" stretch.

Today, for instance, was one of those days. They frequently seem to be Saturdays. Possibly this is because Saturdays are largely unstructured days, which means that you're not used to their rhythm. On a work day, there are easily noted divisions (at work by 8, lunch at noon, off at 5, etc.) which the brain becomes accustomed to. On Saturday, the day seems expansive and infinite due to an almost complete lack of borders or divisions. As such, I tend to think that I can accomplish EVERYTHING in a Saturday, when in reality I can only ever accomplish about 30% of everything, which is a pathetically low number given the sheer volume of Saturdays that I've had to get it right.

As such, today's list of doing A, B, C, D and so on through about HH or so, hardly got off the launching pad. The result is, among other things, a leaking of tasks over into Sunday, the day on which I have consistently accomplished absolutely nothing.

And somewhere in the list of A through HH was "write for ten minutes on The Yellow Shirt" and here is the crap you get because I've just realized things II and JJ which must be accomplished in the next five minutes, seriously.

Possibly getting tickets to the theatre for 6 p.m. on Saturday is not a good idea in that it further exacerbates said problem.

Good bye.

Performing Arts

I'm not sure if this topic is worth ten minutes, but hell, the point of the ten minute writing is to worry less and write more, so I'm going to find out.

I forget sometimes how lucky I am to work in a performing arts building on a college campus. In my building there are four theatres of varying size and purpose, plus a whole ton of rehearsal rooms, classrooms, and all of the other sorts of miscellany that are required to teach and make live, moving art.

Being a theatre person and having worked in this building for [a number about 30% larger than it should be] years, I have become completely accustomed to the various strange things that happen there on a daily basis. You'll find middle-aged professionals who build sets or create props trolling the hallway with, say, a giant rolling cart full of end tables. Or possibly a tree. A costume-shop worker will trot by with a shopping cart filled with 18th century French pants. Ballet dancers on break sit in the hallway and do impossible stretches.

I think the sound, however, is the coolest thing. There is always a herd of music students wandering about with their strangely-shaped instrument cases, muttering in technical jibberish about recessed minor fifths and whatnot. When they're not wandering the halls being geeky, they are sitting in curved rows in a rehearsal room and making ridiculously beautiful music. I have on several occasions walked from one end of the building to the other and heard, in succession, a women's gospel acapella choir rehearsing something unbelievably soulful, a string quartet lilting out the technical perfection of Bach, and a full orchestra (or what sounded like one) practicing some grand symphony complete with melodramatic violins, kettle drums and crashing symbols. (Or cymbals. Sometimes it is fun to leave the incorrectly spelled words.)

This is a good place to work, because there is beauty and weirdness around every corner. I just have to be sure to keep listening, because anything that is always the same becomes quickly taken for granted. Pay. Attention.

Resolve This

Today's ten minutes shall deal with the concept of the New Year's Resolution. I have chosen today to do this because I am at this point just over two successful months into the execution of my own said resolution, which we'll get to in a minute.

It is not particularly insightful of me to point out that the whole industry of the New Year's Resolution is extremely problematic, but it is still true. As we all know, such promises tend to be impossibly far-reaching (I will lose sixty pounds) or vague to the point of being meaningless (I will be a better person). I can't honestly recall if I have ever made any NYRs in the past, so I can't accurately judge my own performance in this venue. Mostly, I've avoided them for the aforementioned reasons, as I am a person whose expansive imagination will, if left uncheck, wander directly towards far-reaching and vague visions of personal change. For instance, if I confront my Sophomore In College self and poke him through the fog of time until he relents and makes a NYR, he would probably say that he'd try to watch less television. Any resolution that begins with "try" is a waste of time, and any fuzzy promise to cut back on TV is doomed for failure.

In any event, this year, I stepped up to the plate and made a Resolution. Actually, it should probably be referred to as a resolution (lower case) because I made it as small, specific, and attainable it could possibly be while still affecting some meaningful change in my life. This approach is inspired by my girlfriend, who annually adds one or two small good habits to her life. This year it was to bring her own canvas bag to the grocery store and thereby decrease that form of human wastefulness by a fraction of one over three billion, which is, after all, the only way you can really change the world. This approach is also inspired by an attempt to avoid the failures listed in the previous paragraph, some of which are frequent visitors to my life-shaped plans.

So this year I've started drinking more water, because water is good for you. There are several things to note about this decisions:

1. I think water is about the most boring thing a person can drink. I cannot tolerate drinking only water while I'm eating, as it basically makes the meal extremely dull. Water from a glass is the most boring variety, but I have found, strangely, that water from a bottle (tap water is just fine, it's the vessel not the source that matters here) is much easier to drink. Thus, the general promise to myself to drink more water took a more concrete and attainable form: one bottle between breakfast and lunch, one between lunch and dinner, one between dinner and bed. That's 1.5 more liters of water than I have ever regularly consumed in my life.

2. I pee a lot now.

3. I feel healthier, whether because of the actual numerous health benefits of drinking water, or because of the psychosomatic effects of doing something that is supposed to be good for you. It doesn't matter which one. This is all about results, not causes.

4. Most importantly, I have demonstrated to myself that the baby steps approach to life change is effective, and I'm going to keep it up. I'd like to thank Richard Dryfus's character in "What About Bob?" for sending me down the "baby steps" road. That guy is a genius, even if he did try to kill Bill Murrray.

5. Stay on topic!

6. And who says that the baby steps process has to start at the beginning of the year. That's pretty arbitrary, isn't it? Maybe I'll enact a New-Mid-Year's Resolution. Can't see why not.

So, are there any good NYRs - failed, successful, or otherwise - out there worth mentioning? Did anyone promise to lay off the smack or quit beating their wife?

Speaking of Overpriced Touring Musical Events...

Last night I saw the "Delirium" company of Cirque de Soleil at the lovely Conseco Fieldhouse. Since I can't currently think of anything else to ramble about tonight, I'm going to review the performance. (Ironically, the tickets cost about as much as an over-marketed touring Broadway musical, but I didn't pay, so there.)

For those of you who don't know, Cirque de Soleil is a performing company that specializes in acrobatics, music, and other circus-style entertainment. Cirque troupes are basically a circus on high-concept steroids. The costumes are beautiful and artsy, the set pieces are unpredictable and fascinating, and there is a seriously weird but aesthetically amazing visual approach to the entire thing. There are at this point something like ten different troupes performing all over the place. Three of them have permanent homes in Las Vegas, for instance, but as new troupes are developed they are sent on international tours. Each troupe has a different approach. For instance, one of the Vegas troupes is called "O" because their entire performance is based on (and in and under) water (French for water = eau = "O").

The coolest thing about any Cirque performance is the number of completely impossible or unexpected physical feats that take place. To get the idea of what I'm talking about, right click here and download a very abbreviated performance by a Cirque troupe at a recent Oscars.

So you go to a Cirque performance expecting eighteen Bulgarians to leap into an inverted human pyramid while juggling knives and wearing amazing lizard costumes, or similar. It is a show that makes you smile for two hours straight because everything you're seeing is beautiful and impossible. This is what I was looking forward to when I walked in to "Delirium" last night.

I started to fear we were in trouble when there was an opening band. "World renown musical artist" Nitza played about six world music/vaguely Middle Eastern tunes with a bunch of accompanying musicians playing strange instruments like the sitar, the lyre, and possibly a hurdy gurdy. All six songs sounded basically the same, and we couldn't tell if Nitza was singing in English or not.

After a twenty minute break following Nitza's set, the show started. I had heard that "Delirium" was going to focus on video projection and music (in the same way that "O" focuses on water), but what we ended up watching was one very long and visually stunning music video. There were some incredibly cool images projected on the massive video screens, and the choreography and timing of the live performers synched with them in nifty ways. The entire thing was very pretty, but I was incredibly disappointed when, over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, only about four impossible physical feats were performed. The rest was a lot of modern dance and world music played on cool instruments and around weird and colorful set pieces. Quite frankly, I got a little bored. I kept waiting for the really cool stuff to happen, and it never did.

So, much more than ten minutes later, I offer you this: If you get a chance to pay too much money to see a Cirque troupe, definitely take the chance, but make sure it's not "Delirium" unless you really like world music.