A few weeks ago

So, I handed over my $10.50 (shit!), and got two boxes of Thin Mints, and one Samoas. Then I promptly went to my desk and polished off one entire sleeve of minty goodness. A whole column… and I had to force myself not to crack open the other one inside the box.

But I wanted to save some for Toney and the kids, and set them aside. But I caught myself looking at the things, stacked on a little shelf to the right of my computer, out of the corner of my eye — for the rest of the evening.

When there are two and a half boxes of cookies within arm’s reach, it’s difficult to focus on the task at hand… I think Lincoln said that.

What are your favorite kinds of Girl Scout cookies? One of my co-workers said he bought a box of Savannahs, and I shouted, “What the hell is that??” It aggravated me, because there’s an established lineup which shouldn’t be tampered with. Savannahs, or whatever they’re called, are like an expansion team in baseball. They’re dead to me, for at least twenty years.

And you know what else is really good, although I almost never buy it? Boy Scout popcorn. When I was in Atlanta there was a guy at work who practically forced everyone, at the point of a gun, to purchase at least one box of the stuff. I lived on beer and burritos in those days, and it broke my heart to hand over ten bucks — or whatever — for freaking popcorn. But I had no choice, really.

And every year, without fail, I’d begrudgingly make some of the stuff in my horrible apartment, and think, “Wow. This is the best goddamn popping corn I’ve ever tasted in my life.” Is that just revisionist memory, or is the stuff really freakishly good? It’s the way I remember it.

Folks are all the time bringing brochures to work, and asking their co-workers to buy something — usually for their kids’ sports teams, or whatever. I’m almost an automatic no, which helps screen me from most of it. Hopefully this Girl Scout cookie purchase won’t ruin my hard-earned reputation…

Just a few weeks ago someone thrust a flier in my hand for a bunch of super-expensive chocolates; the cheapest thing was about fifteen bucks. I just handed it back to him, and said, “Good luck.” Is that assholey? It’s a little bit assholey, isn’t it? But fifteen dollars — or more — is a lot to ask, in my opinion.

What’s the craziest thing someone has tried to sell you at work? I don’t mind the box of one-dollar candy bars on someone’s desk, but don’t generally care for the brochures. What’s your opinion on this subject? Do you have any stories to tell about fundraising co-workers? Please tell us about it.

And speaking of that… I revamped the Souvenir Shop page yesterday. Check it out. None of the stuff is as good as Thin Mints, admittedly, but the shirts and books are pretty good, I think.

Now I need to hit the devil’s parkway, and get back to my job.

I’ll see you guys again tomorrow!

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A few days ago

The 1950s audience would laugh and laugh, and I was wondering what might happen if a current show featured a fat blue-collar worker who threatened to knock his wife to the moon, at the slightest provocation.  Then I thought:  “Well, maybe on cable…  And maybe if it was a ‘dramedy,’ so the producers could claim they were trying to encourage an important national dialogue about spousal abuse… or some such thing.”

From there, I began thinking about other sitcoms, and how they might be adapted as modern-day cable dramas.  And below I’ve tried to come up with a decent pitch for a few of the old shows.  Remember, this would happen in an imaginary world where the original sitcom doesn’t exist, but I am trying to sell the premise of each to FX, HBO, Showtime, AMC, etc. as a drama.

Got it?  OK, let’s go.

Leave It To Beaver  From the outside, the Cleavers appear to be a wholesome American family: a caring father, a loving mother, and two teenage boys – all living together in a beautiful suburban home. However, looks can be deceiving…

Ward, the patriarch, is a proud and brutal man who runs a successful slaughterhouse on the edge of town.  He wants nothing more than to be perceived as an upstanding pillar of the community, and rages whenever that illusion is threatened.

His wife June cheerfully provides meals to the retarded daughter they keep hidden in the basement.  The girl is named Dolores, but is referred to as “The Reet.”  The family’s friends and neighbors sometimes hear strange noises coming from the house, but have no idea the daughter exists.

Wally and Theodore (aka “Beaver,” short for “Beaver Fever”) are troubled youths, who have successfully intimidated most of Mayfield.

Wally heads up a group that deals Oxycontin to high school students, and Theodore is a chronic masturbator who installs hidden cameras in bathrooms and locker rooms, all over town.  When the devices are discovered, nothing is ever done, for fear of retribution at the hands of Wally.  Around Mayfield, the brothers are sometimes referred to as Uday and Qusay.

At the end of the opening credits, Wally, Theodore, and two of their confederates – Lumpy and Whitey – are shown walking toward the camera in slow-motion, before a massive explosion occurs behind them.  Then, in large red block-letters that fill the screen:  Leave It To Beaver.

The show is a statement about the strange, twisted lives that are often secretly played-out behind perfect facades.  It is narrated by a boy named Eddie Haskell, who used to live in the neighborhood, before foolishly needling the younger Theodore (calling him Squirt, and Creep), and ending up as a zip-tied corpse in a rock quarry.

The Munsters  This family of monsters (named Munster) is forced to keep moving from town to town, because the grandfather refuses to abandon his vampire heritage and continues to “feed” on a regular basis.  Herman, the head of the family, is exasperated by the old man, and his stubbornness.  They have numerous arguments about tradition, and the importance of respecting the old ways.

Herman desperately wants the family to integrate into modern American society, but Grandpa refuses to play along.  He prowls the streets of whatever new town they happen to be living in, and feasts on an unsuspecting pedestrian three or four nights per week.  He repeatedly creates a pile of bloodless husks, and a police force looking for answers.

This dynamic is further complicated by Eddie – the son of Herman and his wife Lily – who also happens to be a vampire (it skips a generation).  Grandpa doesn’t encourage Eddie, but doesn’t discourage him, either.  As the boy reaches puberty, local farmers begin to tell of mutilated cattle found in their fields.  Lily says nothing, but is disturbed to find Eddie’s bed sheets stained with more blood than usual.

Herman, who was created from human scraps in a laboratory, is also the victim of prejudice at “the plant,” where he works.  The other men mock the size of his lunchbox, and his effeminate manner.  They say he was clearly given a “fag heart,” which upsets him greatly.

During one such episode Herman begins stomping his feet in frustration, and saying, “Oh darn, oh darn, oh darn, oh darn…”  His super-human strength causes the ceiling to collapse, killing two of his co-workers, and causing a third to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

In addition to Herman, Lily, Grandpa, and Eddie, the family also keeps a prisoner on-hand – always referred to as “Marilyn” – to provide spare parts for Herman.  Once the prisoner has been stripped-down to a hollowed-out torso and head, they discard it and grab another Marilyn from the streets.

Herman burns through body parts (and Marilyns) at an accelerated clip, and Grandpa demands to know how it’s any different than his own late-night outings, for which he’s regularly criticized.

“Apples and oranges,” Herman insists.  “Apples and oranges.”

The Brady Bunch  After Mike Brady’s wife is burned to death in a swift-moving industrial fire, he hooks up with a divorcee named Carol Martin, and they form a blended family.  He has three sons, and she has three daughters.

Mike is a successful architect, and they move into a large home of his own design.  It was supposed to be for him and his first wife, but she is dead now and there is no reason to ever mention her again.  Same goes for Carol’s first husband, who was clearly such a monster he wasn’t granted even supervised visitation rights of his own daughters.  The details of his atrocities are left to the imagination.

At first the new family has difficulties, stemming from the fact they are all being forced to live with, essentially, a gang of strangers.  It doesn’t help matters that the kids – both boys and girls – have to share a weird Jack ‘n’ Jill bathroom, with no toilet.  There is major conflict when Peter innocently walks in one day, as Jan is awkwardly defecating into a Quaker Oats box.  Mike is forced to convene a Brady Family Meeting, to quell the uproar.

But, after everyone gets their sea legs, things settle down.  Sure, there are occasional problems, like with any family, but it only serves to bring them closer together.  Here are a few of the young family’s challenges:

• While horsing around the backyard (which Mike had paved with Astroturf, because he doesn’t trust Mexican gardeners around his daughters), one of the boys throw a football and completely explode Marcia’s face.  She undergoes a series of reconstructive surgeries, but is left with an asymmetrical jaw line.

• Bobby goes to school and brags to everyone that he’s friends with Joe Namath.  However, nobody knows who that is, and they throw Bobby down a flight of concrete steps.  “Maybe your friend Joe Nabors will help push that bone back into your leg!” one of them yells down at him, before departing.

• A bully named Buddy Hinton begins mocking Cindy, because of her degenerative speech disorder.  Every day at school he taunts her with “Baby talk, baby talk, it’s a wonder you can walk!”  Peter tries to take care of the problem, but is promptly beaten unconscious.  Mike and Carol visit the boy’s parents, who turn out to be bullies as well.  Mike attempts to use kung-fu on the father, and receives a severe concussion for his troubles. In the end, Mike and Carol agree to sign over 10% of Mike’s architecture business, so that Buddy will leave Cindy alone.  Mike’s dizzy spells never completely go away.

• During recording sessions for one of Greg’s groovy new songs, Peter’s voice starts to change and ruins everything.  Later the same day Marcia and Jan barge into the boys’ room and present Peter with a stick of deodorant, and say, “Use it. For the love of all that’s holy, you’ve got to use it.”  Then, just two nights later, he is furiously masturbating in his bunk, when the whole thing collapses on Bobby, who is sleeping below.  The younger boy loses a kidney, but eventually recovers, in this tender episode about a boy and his changing body.

• While vacationing in Hawaii, the family’s beloved housekeeper, Alice, is caught in a riptide and whisked out to sea.  Her body is never recovered.

And that was fun…  If I’m unable to hook a cable network with one of those pitches, I’ll do three more next time.  And if you enjoyed it, I’d very much appreciate a mention at Twitter and/or Facebook.  If you’d like, you can even use the handy buttons below.

Thanks, and I’ll see you guys next time.

Have a great day!

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Toney and I

We can get a pair of Droid Razr phones for $150, which is a hell of deal. They were $299 each a couple of months ago.  But I didn’t really like the way it felt in my hand, when I played with one at the store.  It was so big and flat, it reminded me of a graham cracker.  But I’m willing to give it a second look.  Do you have the new Droid Razr? What’s your opinion?

Amazon is also offering the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for $99, which is a great price.  It costs $299 at Verizon.

And, of course, there’s the iPhone, which continues to tempt me.  It’s all very confusing…  I’ll have to live with whatever I choose, for two years.  And that’s a long time, when it comes to gadgetry.  So, I always have a difficult time getting out of the can’t decide phase, when upgrade time gets here.

Do you have any strong opinions about the current Verizon smartphones? Please help confuse me further, won’t you?  Use the comments link below.

Toney put a block of dark chocolate in my lunch on Valentine’s Day.  It was some sort of fanciness (long gone, of course), with big grains of sea salt mixed-in.  It was unusual, and I liked it.  I’d never had chocolate with sea salt in it before, but I’m craving more as I type this. Good stuff.

I used to hate dark chocolate, but now I love it.  And I can’t really think of too many foods that I changed my opinion about, so drastically.

Oh, I could probably list Long Island Iced Tea.  But I never really “loved” them, I just drank ‘em to accelerate the get-drunk process.  I do, however, hate them now.  Just the smell of one makes my stomach churn.  But that’s because I got shitfaced on the evil things one night in 1983, or thereabouts, and vomited myself inside-out at a carnival.  Almost 30 years later, it still sits high atop the ‘no fukkin way’ list.

Do you have any food or drink that you’ve dramatically changed your opinion about, through the years?  We’ll need to know about it.  Especially the non-alcohol items.

And I remembered something from the deep recesses of my Long Island Iced Tea-ravaged brain last night, which I hadn’t thought about in decades.  If you’ve worked retail (and who hasn’t?) did you ever encounter a quick-change scammer?

You know what I’m talking about, right?  Some guy — always a guy — buys a small item with a twenty or a fifty, and immediately starts having second and third thoughts about how he wants his change dispensed.  In no time the cashier is confused as shit, and usually ends up giving the guy an extra ten or twenty bucks.

I think I fell for it once, but had it attempted on me multiple times.  I hate to be outsmarted in those kinds of situations, and refused to allow it to happen a second time.  I always recognized what was going on, and would frustrate them by paying close attention.  That’s usually all it takes.

One time, however, at a convenience store in Dunbar, I encountered a real pro.  He looked like 2Pac, and was the best I’d ever seen.  I ended up closing the cash register and threatening to call the cops.  He just smirked at me, and walked out.  I’m fairly certain he didn’t get any extra money, but he was good, real good.  I think I might have saved myself by refusing to do battle.  A man needs to know his limitations…

Do you know what I’m talking about here?  Have you ever had someone attempt this scam on you?  Usually it just requires a bit of concentration to block, but a professional will flat-out mess with your mind.

And I was talking with a woman at work recently, and she told me about a baby shower she’d attended the previous weekend.  She said they played a game in which five disposable diapers were passed around, with a candy bar melted into each.  And they were supposed to guess the bar, for fun and prizes.

She said people were putting their whole faces into the diapers, and taking deep whiffs.  Supposedly the ones with peanuts almost made her barf, and she was only able to correctly identify one: Kit Kat.  “Because of the wafer.”  She was appalled by the whole thing, and was reportedly sick to her stomach for an hour afterward.  Heh.

And I’m going to call it a day, my friends.  I’m struggling with this one…  I can’t form no sentences too good.  Sheesh.

See ya next time, whenever that happens to be.

Have a great day!

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Thankfully

The first time it happened I was plunged into the kind of blackness I didn’t even realize existed.  I literally didn’t want to get out of bed in the mornings, and nothing could make me happy.  I just sat around sighing all the time.  Everything reminded me of my girlfriend and all the amazing stuff we’d experienced together.  And now it was all gone.  I couldn’t listen to music, because every lyric made me cry.  Probably even Weird Al.

I was a goddamn mess.

The second time was just as bad, with a side order of humiliation.  We were attempting a long-distance relationship — I was in Greensboro and she was still in Dunbar.  One weekend she came for a visit, and within the first two hours, we were done.  She said she had feelings for another guy, and I told her to get the fuck out.  Actually, that was SCREAMED, with my full diaphragm behind it.

She left crying, and ten minutes later I took off after her — wanting to talk it out.  I already regretted the way I’d reacted, and hoped to have a conversation with her before she was completely gone from my life.  We’d been together six years, and I didn’t want it to end with “GET THE FUCK OUT!”  So, I went ripping down the interstate, weaving between cars, and driving like a maniac.

Yeah, I never caught up with her.  I don’t even know if she immediately headed home.  She could’ve gone to Shoney’s for lunch.  Who the hell knows?  It was all a crazy blur.

But I did something really stupid when I returned to Greensboro.  I went to Peaches, the record store where I worked.  I didn’t want to go back to my empty apartment, I guess, and decided to go to work instead.  I was sitting at my desk in one of the back offices, and completely melted down like Steve Bosell.  In front of Brad, and my boss Jeff.  It was a pathetic display.

It took me a long time to recover from that breakup.  I was — as they say — adrift.  It was a bad period of my life.

And my (hopefully) final breakup was also ugly.  Lots of hollering and insults and accusations…  It was in Atlanta, and we were living together in a tiny apartment, across the hall from the pre-Grammy Awards Arrested Development.  After that nasty-ass fight (I’d taken a scorched-earth approach), she left for a few days, and it was just me and her cat.

I liked the cat OK, but she knew something was wrong.  And she made weird crying noises every few minutes, the whole time my girlfriend was gone.  It was awful.

After they (the girl and the cat) moved out I went spiraling down the proverbial rabbit hole, and nearly drank myself into oblivion.  I also “dated” a lot — aggressively and for spite — and it was a bad, awkward time.

It was during that period when I was at a woman’s apartment, nursing a beer on the couch, when she came walking into the room completely naked, and said, “Tonight, I want to explore your body.”  After I stopped laughing, I realized I had no attraction to this person whatsoever.  And I spent the next hour trying to avoid having sex with her.

I was partially successful, thank you very much, and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  It was a mixed-up half-a-year, full of mental illness and alcohol abuse and desperation.  And it’s hopefully something I’ll never have to experience again.

And now, it’s your turn.  If you feel like sharing, on this international day of love (or whatever), please tell us your breakup stories.  Use the comments link below.

Also, I’d like to know your favorite breakup albums.  One of my faves is fairly obscure, by a band called Local H.  The album is called 12 Angry Months, and it’s all about a breakup — the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Here’s someone’s homemade video of the first song.  It’s a great record, and I recommend it highly.  What are some other worthwhile albums on the subject?  Please tell us about it.

And I’ll be back tomorrow, my friends.

See ya then!

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All four of us

But we saw The Woman in Black on Saturday, and it was fun.  The movie, as well as the outing.  I had a great time, and was really craving some normalcy.  It hit the spot; I miss spending time with the family, in a non-hectic, non-stressful way.  It feels like we’re always on the run, trying to get from here to there, etc.  But on Saturday everything was smoove and casual.  It was a good time.

I also saw Red State — Kevin Smith’s new movie — on Netflix Instant.  Thankfully I watched that one by myself, ’cause it was profane past the tipping point.  I don’t personally care one way or the other, but there’s a limit to how much cursing I want to endure with the younglings in the room.  Ya know?  A light dusting is OK, but this was an avalanche, not a dusting.

I enjoyed the flick, though.  It’s not a comedy, which is a departure for Smith, and I was intrigued.  It entertained me, and was unpredictable.  Have you seen it?  What did you think?

And speaking of unpredictable, I find myself enjoying Netflix more since I quit the DVDs and went with streaming only.  I think it might have something to do with the fact that I’m now forced to watch my second or third choice, instead of always having my first choice available.  I’m discovering some good stuff, which probably would have gotten past me before.

I have a positive feeling toward Netflix now, almost like I did when I first subscribed — back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

And if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I’m going to go have a Miranda Cosgrove frozen meal….

OK, I’m back.  I went with the chicken, broccoli, and rice.  Tasty, as usual…  I also emptied the dishwasher while I was away, made the bed, and shaved.  I hate shaving, it’s a giant time-suck.  I’m thinking about just letting it go, and going full Lord of the Rings-nerd with my facial hair.  Of course, I’ll have to buy a tweed flat-cap if I do that, but it might be worth it.

Before I throw in the towel on this one, and head back to work, I thought I’d attempt to set up a Whitney Houston-themed Question of the Day.

I’m not a fan of her style of music, and therefore don’t feel a strong connection to her.  But I can certainly recognize her talent.  Sometimes she took it too far, I think, and sounded like a car alarm going off.  But she had a hell of a voice, I know, and don’t believe too many people would argue that point.  Right?  Right.

But was her death really shocking?  I wasn’t shocked.  She’s been doing hard drugs for a couple of decades.  I know it might seem insensitive, but when people say they were shocked, I just roll my eyes.  Tragic, sure.  But not surprising.

And so, for a Question I’d like to know what celebrity deaths ACTUALLY shocked you?  I can think of two, right off the top of my head:  John Lennon and Princess Diana.  But I don’t have the time to dig any deeper than that.  I’m going to have to leave it to you guys.  Please use the comments link below.

And I’ll be back tomorrow.

Have a great day!

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