Month: December 2015

Nickels and Dimes

Pavowski2 Comments

Len turns the tin cup restlessly in his hands and slams it to the pavement. It’s been five hours this morning and he has barely enough to buy a cup of coffee, maybe a newspaper.

Hardly the beginnings of another empire.

He scratches at the back of his grimy neck with jagged fingernails cracked and splintering from scraping change off the pavement. Casts baleful eyes up at the pedestrians walking past him.

“Spare a dollar?”

They walk past with nary a glance down at his unwashed Armani overcoat.

To hell with this small change, he thinks.

Approaching him is a guy in a suit. Pinstripes. Glaring yellow tie. Len owned a tie like that once. Never wore it. Couldn’t stomach the color. Now he’s positively salivating at the sight of it. He gets a wild idea. Smooths down his wild hair, spits in his hand and wipes his face as much as he can. Impressions matter.

He hops to his feet and falls in step with the suit, avoiding his notice for the moment thanks to the cell phone glued to the guy’s other hand.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” he says in his best business school voice.

The suit turns and grimaces. Says nothing. Doesn’t have to.

Len starts to protest, grabbing at the man’s arm. Reflexively, like a squid shooting ink, the man throws a small handful of change at Len: “Just leave me alone!” The coins bounce off Len’s chest and he stares, dumbfounded. Looks at the spinning nickels and dimes tinkling onto the sidewalk. Kicks them away.

Len looks up, catching his reflection in a storefront window. Behind his reflection float rows upon rows of oak-colored liquor in gleaming glass bottles. He steps to the side, craning his neck; a scruffy guy with glasses sits half-reading, half-nodding over a newspaper behind the counter. How much cash does a liquor store keep to hand? A couple hundred, at least, he figures.

He shoves his hand into his pocket, makes a gun with index and thumb, and eases into the store.

He pretends to shop for a minute before approaching the attendant. He steps up airily, looking around, as if he’s about to ask for the time.

“Is that an Armani?” the keeper asks.

Len, flummoxed, mumbles, “yeah.”

“The hell did you get that?”

“It’s mine. I used to run a Fortune 500 Company.” Len can’t help but straightening a little, assuming some of his old posture.

The guy studies him hard, chewing on his lip. Then his eyes light up. “You’re Len Fitcher, CEO of Narrington Pharmaceuticals!”

“Ex. Ex-CEO.”

The man blinks. “Well, shit, man. Do you want a job?”

“Do I want a …” Len is too flabbergasted to finish the sentence. His teeth grind, and his throat tightens in a growl. He thrusts his gun-hand in his pocket toward the man’s face. “I don’t want a goddamn job. I want your fucking money.”

*****************

I’ve been working on a handful of shorts — 500 words or fewer apiece, a real challenge for me — for the past several weeks in lieu of working on novels or other such large-scale projects. This is one of them. Not sure yet what I’m doing with the rest. We’ll see. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Zombies Among Us

Pavowski7 Comments

We hear it all the time, right? Kids today are ungrateful, lazy, entitled; they’re flushing the future of the planet down the toilet, they couldn’t math their way out of a paper bag, if it’s not on google they can’t be bothered to learn it.

It’s all true, of course, and it’s all also woefully simplified. Kids by and large are going to use the technology and the means of the day to put in the least amount of effort and get away with what they can. Of course, if life is a slippery slope, then the automated chairs that keep us from even being forced to do so simple a thing as walking in a movie like Wall-E are not so very far off.

They’ve got this new thing — maybe you’ve seen it — called a hoverboard.

It’s kinda like a Segway, keeping the rider balanced using gyroscopic technology. But with a minuscule footprint and using literally only your feet, it’s the hottest hot thing, especially among the youths.

youths

I’m a high school teacher, so I have a pretty high tolerance for youthful entitlement and sass, not to mention casual indifference to the world in favor of a tiny glowing screen. But even I was taken aback by the display my wife and I saw in Target the other day. (Why do so many of my stories take place at Target? Why am I always seeing stuff to get good and twisted about at Target? More evidence, I think, that Target is the glowing sun at the center of our capitalist universe.)

We’re shopping, somewhere around the hair products aisle (it’s funny how much I still notice the hair products aisle, as if they made an ounce of difference for a baldy like me), when two teenage girls swing into the main aisle in front of us: one walking, the other riding a hoverboard.

Now, if you haven’t seen these things yet, you really are limited when riding one. You have to hold your body very still, lest you throw yourself out of balance and wipe out in dramatic and delightful fashion (just do a youtube search for “hoverboard crashes”, and laugh away a few hours). So you’re limited in the first place to a sort of zombielike pose. And, hey, since you’re standing still while you roll around the store anyway, why not entertain yourself on the go with a book? HAHAHAHA of course not. The hoverboard girl was, of course, staring into the magical world of her cell phone as she trawled the aisles of the ‘Get.

Then she and her friend had to turn around. Presumably because they forgot to pick something up, or — this is Target, after all — some subconscious advert suddenly took root in their brains and they realized they needed to go back and spend more money. So they turn, and I get a look at them face-on.

And the walking girl looks perfectly normal and average. Face blank but engaged, looking around, you know — signs of life. But the hoverboard girl lowers her phone for a moment and looks where she’s going. (Presumably so that she doesn’t end up in the search results for “hoverboard crashes.”) My god, her face.

If you were to try and personify “disinterest,” her face would have been a good candidate. If you wanted to try to explain to somebody what it felt like to watch C-SPAN for fourteen hours, you might start with a picture of her face. A torture victim, deprived of food and water for days and given to believe that there was no escape in this life, might adopt an affect as empty and hopeless as hers.

I wish I’d taken a picture, but I wasn’t a quick enough draw with my phone. Also, I’m way too much of a chicken to take a picture of somebody doing something dumb to their face. (Unless I know you. Then it’s open season.) The eyes were half-lidded, like the collapsing blinds in an abandoned house. The mouth, open and slack, as if waiting for a train of ants to march in and start retrieving crumbs. A tiny line of drool from lip to shirtfront would not at all have seemed out of place. She looked, in short, as if she had just emerged from a nice, deep coma, except for the whole standing-upright thing.

Honestly and truly, just add a little costume makeup and dirty up her outfit, and she’d have been a perfect extra on The Walking Dead.

zombie-apacalypse

And she had just come out of a coma, hadn’t she?

What use has your brain when everything that interests you and excites you is delivered straight to your face by a device you can carry around in your hand? What use have your legs when you can get wherever you want to go by leaning ever so slightly forward? (Except for stairs, I guess.)

Technology is awesome. The science behind these things is mind-shattering.

But for some, it all just seems so mundane.

Not that I think it will happen at this point, but here’s hoping I never lose the ability to wonder at how fargoing amazing the world around us is.

Toddler Life, Chapter 338: Picture Day

Pavowski3 Comments

Being a kid sucks.

I mean, to an adult, being a kid is awesome: you have zero responsibilities, zero stress; all you have to worry about is whether you want mac and cheese or chicken nuggets for dinner, or how many laps you can run around the couch before you get dizzy and fall over, or how many colored scribbles you can get on the wall before your parents have a hissy fit. (The answers, obviously, are chicken nuggets, twenty six, and anywhere from three to a hundred and three, depending on how much you’re laughing like a maniac while you do it.)

But actually being a kid actually sucks.

You’re always getting hauled off to places you don’t care about. Trips to the grocery store or to Target. Stops at the bank. A daily sojourn to day care. Then, you’re being forced to do all sorts of things that interest you not a bit. Eating vegetables. Going to bed at a “reasonable” hour. Not coloring on the walls. (I should confess that both of my kids are actually pretty well-tempered about these things almost all the time.)

But despite these day-to-day inconveniences, I don’t know that, for a kid, there is any indignity worse than picture day.

You wake up, hoping for a day of cartoons and playgrounds, of candy and sunshine, but the parents are up. And they’re a little bit more wound up than usual. Bustling about. Rushing through breakfast. Nipping at each other about time and duties and outfits and responsibilities. Then they’re stuffing you into stiff clothes that — let’s be honest — are a little long in the sleeve or short in the leg: uncomfortable threads that rub and irritate and constrict and ride up.

Next thing you know, you’re crammed into the car seat — but you can’t have any snacks, because you can’t get any gunk on your hands, and you can’t have anything to drink, because you might spill it on yourself. Now you’re sitting around a lobby, and sure, there are toys around, but they’re not great toys, and your parents are getting mad at you for trying to run around and crawl on the seats, and there’s nothing really to do except sit around and not have fun. Anathema for a toddler.

Finally, you’re shepherded into another room with some other lame toys and a weird adult with a fancy camera, poking and prodding at you and telling you where to stand, how to sit, where to prop your knees, and she keeps telling you to “smile” or say “puppies” and all manner of adults-talking-to-kids-they-don’t-know nonsense.

Intolerable.

You can bear it for a few minutes because you’re generally agreeable, and your parents seem really concerned about you doing what the other weirdo asks. But you’re three. There’s only so much you can stand. The ants start creeping in and you have no more patience for holding still. They’re still asking you to smile, but all you can do is bare your teeth like a wild animal. Meanwhile, your baby sister has long ago given up the fight and is intermittently squalling like a hamstrung sheep or swatting you about the face with spit-slick hands.

Somehow, you survive it, and you end up at home again. You’re allowed to put normal clothes on again and have something decent to eat. And what do you have to show for this? A handful of pictures of you, which makes not an ounce of goldfingered sense to you, seeing as the house is full of pictures of you anyway.

20151206_115803.jpg
You may have heard the expression about “herding cats.” It’s much more apt as “herding a 2- and 3-year old.”

 

The Weekly Remotivator: The Mission

Pavowski8 Comments

We all suck starting out.
There’s an old saying about nothing worth doing being easy. That may be true, but I’d wager that a lot of people trying something new for the first time never get far enough to find out just how difficult the thing is. You pick up a guitar, plunk out a few discordant notes, maybe plug away for a week or two until your fingers get sore; then you listen to Freebird, realize you’ll never shred like that, and suddenly the guitar is gathering spiders in the attic. You lace up your shoes to give running a try, and you manage to power through some really painful stumbling outings; then it’s a few weeks later and you just can’t bring yourself to head out in the eighty-degree heat, and once you miss a workout, missing the next is easy.
You set out to write a novel, thinking (rightly) that anybody can do it.  You pound the keys for a good solid month before you realize that your characters are boring, your setting makes no sense, and your plot is as dead as a shark that doesn’t swim. Then your manuscript goes into the abyss of unfinished novels and you maybe start over, or you maybe just quit.
When you start something new, people say you should have a goal. Something to work toward, something achievable. And that’s well and good: you should have a goal. But there comes a point, when you’re up against that wall where the thing goes from hard to STUPID hard, when you need something even more than a goal.
You need a mission.
The difference is subtle.
A goal is something clearly defined that you want to accomplish.
A mission is something clearly defined that you MUST accomplish.
With a mission, failure is not an option. With a mission, obstacles are unable to stop you; they can only delay you. With a mission, it’s success or death.
The Blues Brothers were on a “mission from God.” NASA’s headquarters for space missions is called, unsurprisingly, Mission Control. Failure is not an option.
So, the next time you try something new, don’t set a goal.
Set a mission.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Bullets and Blowhards

Pavowski5 Comments

Another day, another shooting. People are going to rush to judgment, fingers will be pointed, pulpits will be pounded upon. The dead will be used as bricks in a wall built around our violently entrenched personal beliefs.

This is not a political site, and I don’t want it to be. But it’s impossible to look the other way when there are two high-profile shootings with multiple fatalities within days of each other.

There are discussions to be had about religious fundamentalism and what needs to be done about it.

There is something to be said about terrorism, foreign and domestic.

Maybe there’s even something to be said about our own society: how we don’t know each other, how we’re more and more isolated on our own islands, not knowing what lives in our neighbor’s hearts.

But let’s first of all take a look at a sickness in our country which is undeniably caused (or, at least, worsened) by such ready, easy access to guns, and let’s maybe, just maybe, not go straight to the assumption that the answer to the problem is more guns in the hands of more people.

JUMP-TO-CONCLUSIONS-MAT

And then, on the other hand, let’s go ahead and grant that guns in the hands of the right people are what brought this particular massacre to an early end.

Pray about it, if that’s your thing (but don’t forget that whoever or whatever you’re praying to allows this stuff to happen, day in and day out). But also recognize that the only thing that is going to stop tragedies like this (or, let’s be honest, lessen tragedies like this — people are people, after all) is by making it harder for the wrong people to get the guns. And that means we have a duty to vote against the cement posts in the ground who block any and all gun legislation at every turn.