Tag: funny

Locker Room Talk

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There’s been a lot of talk about “locker room talk” the past couple of days. But I don’t think any of the people talking about this so-called “locker room talk” actually know how people talk in locker rooms. (For the most part, guys don’t talk in locker rooms — they’re trying too hard not to catch an eyeful of old man scrotum.)

So to clarify what actual locker room talk might sound like, I reimagined a certain prominent recent conversation as it might more conceivably play out.

Please to enjoy.

 

Two men, on opposite ends of “middle aged”, meet in a locker room. A TV in the corner plays entertainment news.

Tronald: Hey.

Billiam: Hi.

Tronald: (gesturing towards the TV) You see her?

Billiam: Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Who’s that? She looks familiar.

Tronald: Ancy O’Dale. Pretty hot, right?

Billiam: Sure.

Tronald: I put a move on her, once.

Billiam: Who, the girl on TV?

Tronald: That’s right. Bought her some furniture.

Billiam: You — what? I thought you said you put a move on her.

Tronald: Yup.

Billiam: So … you bought her furniture? That was the move?

Tronald: I have a lot of money.

Billiam: I see.

Tronald: She was married, though.

Billiam: Wait. She was married when you put the move — when you bought her furniture?

Tronald: Sure. I was, too. I tried to bang her. Came up short.

Billiam: That’s … not cool. Why would you hit on a married woman? Especially when you were married yourself?

Tronald: Well, I had just gotten married.

Billiam: That’s even worse!

Tronald: Eh. It was only my third marriage.

Billiam: Jesus.

Tronald: Hey, do you have any mints? I could really go for a Tic-Tac.

Billiam: Um, I might, let me check.

Tronald: I get that bad breath, you know what I mean? I’m doing this interview in a few minutes, and you never know what might happen.

Billiam: I really don’t need to know. (Finds mints, offers them.) Here.

Tronald: Thanks, guy. (He tilts most of the pack into his mouth, crunches them loudly.) I might try to kiss this one, I don’t know.

Billiam: Huh? I thought you said you were doing an interview?

Tronald: Sure, but I just love women, you know? If she’s beautiful, I might just try to kiss her. I can’t help myself.

Billiam: Whoa. Stop. You’re just meeting this woman for the first time, and you think you might try to kiss her?

Tronald: I meet beautiful women all the time. As often as I can. I run beauty pageants, you know. Part of the deal. Sometimes I try to kiss them, sometimes I don’t. Just depends how I feel.

Billiam: What about how they feel?

Tronald: What do you mean?

Billiam: The women. You just kiss them? I mean, the ones you feel chemistry with, or … I really don’t understand.

Tronald: No, no chemistry. I just see a beautiful woman, I try to kiss her.

Billiam: That’s … a little rapey, isn’t it?

Tronald: It’s all right. They don’t mind. I’m a star. I can do whatever I want. Grab them by the pussy, whatever.*

Billiam: The — WHAT?

Tronald: What?

Billiam: Dude, that’s actual sexual assault. You know that, right?

Tronald: You want to come with me? I can get you one, too.

Billiam: No. NO. Who the hell even are you, anyway?

Tronald: I’m running for president.

(Billiam just stares, dumbfounded.)

Tronald: Can I count on your vote?

Billiam, now dressed, scurries out to tell all his friends not to vote for serial abusers, as though such a thing had to be said.

 

**I just want to tell you how uncomfortable it makes me to use the word, even when quoting somebody who, I feel, is a totally reprehensible excuse for a human. But we can’t go mincing words, and we can’t go pretending total jerks didn’t say the things they actually said, live, on video.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Awkwardity

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I’ve always been pretty awkward.

That might come as a shock, given my background in theater and my career choice as a teacher and the way I prattle on at length about any- and everything around here, but there it is.

Socially awkward. I’ve even gone so far to consider myself socially retarded. I’m often the quiet guy in the room, not because I don’t want to take part in conversations (well, sometimes), but because I just don’t know what to say. But then, what feels like a comfortable silence to me will turn into an uncomfortable silence in the room, and then I sit there thinking I should really say something, but then the words come out like cow vomit.

I think a lot of people struggle with this, but I also think I maybe have it more than most. (Then again, maybe that’s the old Dunning-Kruger effect talking — that thing that makes you overestimate your experience when you don’t have much. Americans, it turns out, suffer from Dunning-Kruger than most other nationalities.) Like, I know that some people feel awkward sometimes. There are hashtags about it. But for me, it feels like it’s all the time.

And I think that’s part of what compels me to write. Because I screw up these social interactions every day, so I get another crack at them when I create these alternate realities in my own head. And again, I think we all do that — we all play the I shoulda said THIS game — but for a writer, it’s different. When I tell a story, I get to get it right, and (hopefully!) readers get to see me get it right.

They say you should write what you know, and while I think that advice can be overly limiting (if we kept to it, we’d never have science fiction), it’s also pretty impossible to avoid. All writers, I think, write themselves into their stories. And in looking at the stories I’ve written, the characters I’ve spent the most time with… well, it’s safe to say that they’re pretty socially awkward like me.

First novel: A struggling writer battles through his self-doubt with the help of a muse. His only real friend is the one who is financially obligated to spend time with him. Hmm!

Second novel: A girl who is socially segregated because of the role that’s been selected for her by the community. She doesn’t have friends because she will, for all intents and purposed, be “killed” when she comes of age, and everybody knows it. Hmm, hmm!

Third novel: A kid born to superhero parents has no superpowers, but falls in with the superheroes anyway — so that he can learn to exploit them. He trusts none of his “classmates,” and in return they ridicule and fear him. Hmm, hmm, hmm!

So authors write themselves into their stories; this is a trope we’re all familiar with, and I certainly seem to be doing it. But is it a thing we can avoid? Well, with novel #2, the protagonist I described was not actually the protagonist for 80% of the first draft; she was a supporting character who I realized was a lot more compelling than the protagonist I was trying to write. That person was popular, and fit in effortlessly with his social group and with somebody beyond it — and he rang hollow to me for most of the writing. So it can be done, but not without its pitfalls.

Pitfalls. If there’s an apt metaphor for the writing process, it’s a field littered with pitfalls. Because as you build this story for your characters (the ones who are totally yourself), you have to place pitfalls in their path, try to trip them up at every step. But you have to watch out for your own pitfalls, the gaps and the traps that threaten to snag you in the midst of your process. It’s a delicate dance.

And dancing is something we awkward types don’t really do so much.

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.

 

Our Voices Reach Far

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The focus of this blarg has never been to rack up huge numbers of readers or views. Those things are nice — it’s nifty to watch the spinning wheels of the virtual odometer on the wall click over and reach new heights — but, even almost two years after I laid down the first lexile brick here on my corner of the net, the purpose is the same as it was: to think and write about the process of my “real” writing, and to serve as a release valve to vent my spleen from time to time.

Still, it’s neat to see those numbers grow. And while it would be hard to call my readership a horde, there’s an uptick that’s measurable. 1000 more views from my first year to my second. I’ve already had as many unique visitors this year as in last year, with three months to go. Which means that my little imprint here is growing, that more people are reading what I’m shouting into what I so often think of as the void.

measured-sandwich
I went to pixabay.com for an image of an odometer and found this picture instead. You’re welcome.

 

And that inevitably causes me to wonder how people end up at my site, and for those that end up clicking around a little bit, what makes them stay. Usually I have no idea. WordPress reveals my “trends” and my most popular posts to me, but there’s little rhyme or reason there. This year, the top of the pops has been my “Do You Wanna Go To Target” bit of fluff, composed after listening to the Frozen soundtrack for roughly the three-thousandth time when my wife and I were making a day run to Target. Then there’s a little muser of a piece I popped off about the symbolism and the ubiquity of light and dark in literature, which gets a handful of hits every week. And then, it’s been a constant head-scratcher ever since I penned it, but the story I didn’t write about giving my son an enema never seems to leave the top five.

Still, trends seem to balance out and I have a more-or-less regular crew of readers, I think. Unless I go crazy and write four or five posts a week, I usually get about ten reads a day. And while that’s not shattering any internet records or anything — I mean, if I wanted views and clicks, I’d go spout profanity about Donald Trump while wearing a fire helmet and slathering myself in chocolate sauce on youtube or something — it’s an extra little kick in the pants to keep me writing, knowing that there are people out in the cyberverse picking up what I’m putting down.

But then there are the outlier days, like this wekend, that strike like lightning and with about as much explanation. Saturday, my website was accessed from eleven countries. Eleven! Imagine, the drivel I penned while sitting on my couch with my lazy golden retriever sitting next to me and my kids strewing Legos across the living room floor (setting traps for my tender feet), somehow made it, literally, to the far corners of the globe. Wild. And then, Sunday, my website had over 100 views. A hundred! That’s never happened, and I have no idea why it happened. I can hope that some doppelganger, some kindred spirit, read some old post of mine and spent hours plumbing the depths of my site, nodding his (or her!) head in silent, shocked agreement and wonder. Equally possible, I guess, is that it was a gaggle of readers whose cats fell asleep on their keyboards and kept hitting the refresh key.

Who can figure these things out? Determining what will resonate with readers is about as easy as reading your future in the entrails of the hobo you killed and buried in the crawl space. Which is to say, tricky at the very least.

As usual, the only thing to do is keep writing.

Thanks for reading.

Or, maybe, thanks to your cat for falling asleep on the keys.

Toddler Life, Chapter 419: We Have Lost Normality

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Kids make you insane.

Not necessarily in that gibbering, banging-your-head-against-the-walls, strait-jacket kind of insane (well, maybe in small doses), but in the way that it warps the way you look at the world. The world a parent lives in is not the same world that a normal human lives in. We see things that are invisible to most people. We do things that make normal people scratch their heads in wonder. Our heads are constantly filled with bizarre fuzzy maths that would make the physics department at MIT weep. We tie ourselves in knots to make the world livable for ourselves and the future humans we are tasked with raising to adulthood.

Here are just a few of the strange behaviors that have become totally commonplace for my wife and myself since having kids (we have two, and that’s probably significant as well):

  1. Normal people can drink out of cups, but we can’t. If we have a glass of some beverage, and we leave that beverage unattended for even fifteen seconds, then that beverage will end up spilled on the couch, the carpet, the dog, or possibly the ceiling. The fact that we have cats plays in here, too, because our cats cannot abide an upright glass. So instead we drink out of bottles with lids, all the time, until the kids are asleep.
  2. Normal people lock the bathroom door to poop, but we don’t. I don’t even close the door all the way; I just rest it lightly against the frame. For some reason, the kids never want my attention so much as when I’m trying to drop a deuce; something about the fact that I’m bent over, pants around the ankles, making my offering to the porcelain god brings them scrambling. And here comes that mental math I mentioned: I can lock the door (which will keep them both out) or simply close it (which might keep out the 2-year-old), but then I have to suffer the slings and arrows of a tireless banging on the door to the chorus of “DADDY? DADDY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Or, I can give them easy access, and put up with the lesser indignity of relieving myself in front of two future humans while listening to them prattle on about the bug they just saw or the piece of candy they want or why does it smell funny in here? (Generally, the prattle wins out over the banging on the door.)
  3. Normal people can buy just one of something, but we can’t. When we buy treats — and let’s go ahead and establish that a “treat” is anything special that one of them gets that isn’t basic sustenance — we have to buy two. Two bags of popcorn at Target. Two kiddie sundaes at the restaurant (not that we take them out to eat with us, but on that rare occasion…). Two silly little paper hats. Case in point: just this past weekend, we were at the grocery store and saw on the endcap (by the way, the people who design end caps for grocery stores and for Target seriously need to be shot, or at least saddled with a 2-year-old and forced to walk through their own stores) a cute little pair of Minion goggles. You know, the annoying little blobs from that Steve Carrell movie, Despicable Me? Well, my son loves those things, and the goggles were only a couple of bucks, so of course I picked them up. My wife immediately went to pick up a second pair for my daughter. She doesn’t even like the minions, as far as I can tell, but the point is, my son had a thing, so it was gonna be a problem if she didn’t have that thing, too. So we double up, and fill our house with twice as much crap.
  4. Normal people check the thermostat maybe once or twice a day, but I have to check it somewhat more often. This makes me crazy, because the thermostat is not a thing that changes on its own, and I feel like an insane person looking at it as often as I do. But little kids love pushing buttons, both the metaphorical and the literal. Seriously, they had somehow managed to turn on the heat while it was 95 degrees out the other day. Luckily, I caught it before the house or any of us combusted from the heat. Because I check the thermostat more often than your dad does. Every time I walk past the thing, I check it. Very OCD, and I am not even a little OCD.
  5. Normal people know what “no” means, but we don’t. The word “no” means nothing in our house. For two reasons. First of all, it obviously means nothing to the children. My wife and I say it and say it and say it, but they keep asking or doing the thing that had us saying “no” in the first place, so we clearly haven’t taught the meaning of this simplest of words properly. Then, there’s that thing that happens, you know, where you say a word over and over and over in rapid succession and, like a soggy Cheerio, it just kind of disintegrates in your mind? Like the syllables and the letters come apart and the meaning just evaporates? Where do words come from, anyway? What’s a language, for that matter? How are we even able to communicate at all?

There are more, but I have to go check the thermostat.

How about you, dear readers? In what ways have your kids fragmented your reality?

On Parenting: Lesser Indignities

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The kids are screaming again.

We’ve been home from work for about twenty minutes, and they’re screaming. And “screaming” is precisely the word for it — this is not a mildly perturbed whine, nor a plaintive cry for help — this is a top-of-the-lungs howl that doesn’t even really call for action or intervention, it simply rails against the great injustice of the world.

And it’s in response to a “stolen” spoon.

Not even a special spoon. In fact, the spoon in question is the exact twin of the one that sprout the younger holds clutched in her pudgy, grubby fist. But the spoon in question has been claimed from the tabletop by sprout the elder, and she has decided that that is the spoon she wants, not eventually but right the fargo NOW, and it gives him great pleasure to deny her anything she wants, and from her tiny lungs comes the mightiest ear-splitting shriek.

That sounds like fun, sprout the first thinks, and then he’s shrieking too, for the pure, unadulterated hell of it. My wife is up to her eyeballs in work she’s brought home from the job that taxes her more and more beyond her pay grade with every passing day, and I’m elbows-deep in chicken slime from cooking the sprouts’ dinner (which they will later totally ignore, for reasons that certainly make sense in the brains of a two- and four-year-old, but for no reason this thirty-something college-educated male can discern), and there’s nothing that anybody can do.

Time out, we threaten, which has about as much effect as you’d expect. Spanking, we enjoin, which they know is an empty threat — I’m not going to turn my salmonella hands upon them, after all.

This is how it goes in our house lately. And as parents, we get really torn, because all they really want is attention. They’re in day care these days, after all, so they only get our company for a few blessed hours in the evening. But, as any working family knows, you come home from work and there’s dinner to cook and baths to prepare and messes to clean up and the stress of the day hanging like an albatross from your neck and it’s almost a better idea if we don’t interact with the sprouts too much, because we might really unload on them, and they sure don’t deserve that. But still they clamor, and sometimes we can push the dark clouds aside and spare them a few minutes amongst the cascading junk pile of demands on our time, but sometimes we can’t, and when we can’t, well, that’s when the screaming starts.

Over anything. She’s in his chair. He’s got a toy that she wants. She dropped that thing I was playing with. He’s painting and she wants to paint too. She’s chewing on the coffee table. He’s holding onto the back of her shirt.

Their cries could shatter glass at a hundred yards.

And again, we endure it, because it’s better that than unloading a day’s worth of frustration and choked-back snide comments and real gut-boiling traffic-induced rage on somebody who has to stand on tiptoes to brush their teeth and who thinks that a dinosaur might make a really cool friend.

And then, somehow, some way, the clouds part, a ray of light shines down, and they stop howling. My wife and I lock eyes in shock but we say nothing. We don’t even try to look and see what they’re up to, lest we break the spell. We hear harmless, idle chatter from sprout the younger, and giggling, broken sentences from sprout the elder.

Just as quickly as the toddler tornado struck, the skies have cleared and they’re playing happily together. If we believed in God, we’d fall to our knees and give thanks, but God will soon make his absence painfully clear.

THUMP. THUMP THUMP.

It’s surprising how much any thumping sound can sound like a toddler’s head whacking any significant surface to a pair of bedraggled parents. We’re sure one of them has somehow managed to surmount the childproof stair gate and toss the other to their doom. We dash around the corner and look.

But they’re not dead. Not even close. They’re standing behind their little toddler armchairs, which have been upended and rolled across the floor, like wheels if they were designed by sadists and masochists working in perfect concert. THUMP THUMP. They push their chairs over and over, and the sound is a bit like carpet-wrapped bricks in a tumble dryer. THUMP THUMP. THUMP THUMP. Giggles. Laughter. Smiles.

Chairs aren’t supposed to be played with that way, for sharknado’s sake, and our teach-them-to-be-decent-human-beings instincts flare and we start for them with our voices already rising in chastisement.

But we realize it at the same time.

They’re not screaming.

Sure, they’re mistreating the furniture. Sure, it’s making an ungodly racket. Sure, they might crush a cat under all that tumbling upholstery (but the cat has it coming, and frankly the cats can go take a flying leap for all we’re concerned about their well-being at the moment). But paint this bald man blue and send me to Vegas, they have stopped screaming.

Being a parent is nothing if not a tactical, well-calculated slow retreat from a thousand lines drawn in the sand. Problem is, the tide never stops coming in. You have to pick your battles, and sometimes you choose the lesser indignity of the children pushing their tiny chairs around the floor like the worst sleds you’ve ever imagined over the perfectly disharmonious symphony of their unending screams.

We let this one slide. I finish cooking and my wife finishes working to the THUMP THUMP THUMPing of their chair game that would rival the dance beats of a few songs I’ve heard on the radio lately. We place a lovingly-crafted dinner of chicken and potatoes and green beans in front of them and watch as they refuse to eat a single bite. And yeah, that hurts my feelings a little bit.

But at least they’re not screaming.