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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 24: Confucius

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Once I finished constructing the machine, I lit the burners, built up a head of steam, spun the dials, pulled the levers, and began my journey back in time.

 

Abraham Lincoln clearly needed more sleep.

Abraham Lincoln clearly needed more sleep.

First stop: 1864, Washington, D.C., to pick up President Lincoln, the wisest and tallest of American presidents.

Second stop: 477 B.C., near present-day Qufu, Shandong Province, China, home of Confucius, the legendary philosopher, statesman and fortune-cookie author.

Third stop: 2013, The Vesta Dipping Grill in Denver. Trendy and expensive, the restaurant is named for the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family, and relies on themes of warmth, sensuality and dreams to showcase the skewers of grilled meats and vegetables it serves accompanied by about two dozen inventive dipping sauces—the black pepper aioli garlic mayonnaise with coarsely ground black pepper, for instance, or Steuben’s chimichurri cilantro with parsley, onion, chili flakes, and cumin. Diners are encouraged to combine the sauces to create a chorus of flavors, and Vesta’s seemed liked the perfect place for my dinner with two of the greatest orators in history, especially since they could afford to pay.

Abe: Gotta tell you, Mike, you might not have a face, but you sure know how to pick a restaurant. I haven’t had a meal this good in two score and three years. Who would’ve thought you could dip a forkful of succulent chicken into a sweet chili ginger sauce followed by a pistachio mint sauce and create something so damn tasty? This is the sort of perfect union I’ve been harping about back in Congress! America could learn a lot from Vesta.

Confucius: I dunno, Abe. It’s pretty good, but it’s no blintz.

Abe: Blintz?! You’re Chinese! You know what a blintz is?

Confucius: Sure, dude. I once had a chocolate blintz at little deli in Bejing that would’ve knocked my socks off, if the Chinese had invented socks. Paper, ice cream, gunpowder and the compass we invented. Would it have killed us to invent socks? My feet are freezing half the year. Anyway, nothing beats a good blintz.

Abe: I agree wholeheartedly, Fu. There was this little blintz joint near the state house in Illinois that I used to eat at all the time. Made sex with Mary seem boring. Well, more boring. She’s not much in the sack. Hey, what say we wrestle after dinner? You look like a man who could hold his own in the grappling ring.

Confucius: Uhm, no. Hate sports. Kung Fu, karate all that crap. Hurts like hell when you get body slammed or neck chopped. Besides, it is not the man who runs fastest who leads the race, but the one who pauses to think before he reads a book.

Me: I have no idea what that means, Fu.

Confucius had some crazy facial hair.

Confucius had some crazy facial hair.

Confucius: Tough nuggets. They can’t all be gems, my faceless friend. I get tired of having to be pithy and brilliant all the time. Nobody ever just lets me kick back and relax. It’s always, “Teach me, enlighten me, expand my world, tell me a story.” Sometimes I just want to tell everybody to shut the fuck up and figure things out for themselves.

Abe: Same problem here, Fu. Every damn day, a constant stream of people ask me to resolve this conflict and resolve that conflict, like I’m a professional mediator or whatever. Like I care if the world explodes. Sometimes I just want to kick back in my top hat and underwear with a beer and a bag of pretzels and watch the game. But, no!

Me: This meeting of the minds isn’t unfolding like I imagined it would.

Confucius: The superior man understands what the inferior man can’t learn if you give him a bowl of pomegranate seeds.

Me: Still lost here, Fu.

Abe: Let’s just eat. Mind the spicy sauces, tho, Mike. Without eyelids, you could have a hell of time if you accidentally get one in your eyes.

Me: Okay, thanks. I’ll be careful.

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I know it’s hard to believe, but this is my entry for the 23rd day of Nicky and Mike’s blogging competition. If you want to see what other people wrote, please visit We Work for Cheese.

 

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 19: Little things

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Some mornings I wake up, groan, get out bed because I have to go to the bathroom, and then go to work because I have to pay my bills.

Other mornings I wake up, groan, get out bed because I have to go to the bathroom, and then go to work because I have to pay my bills. Proving that one day follows another, each one of them pretty much exactly like the one before it.

But once in a while something unusual happens.

Something……well, something wonderful.

It happened recently.

I’d just trudged home from my dreary job at the bottle factory — I check for chips in the glass — when I thought to check the mailbox. Usually, I don’t bother, partly because I’m afraid poisonous/hairy/jumping spiders might be hiding inside, and partly because I never know when one of my NRA card-carrying neighbors is going to rig the damn thing with explosives as a practical joke. I don’t want to risk getting my hand blown off just to retrieve the latest discount pizza coupon or Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. I have kids for that sort of work.

This time, however, I peeked inside and saw a large yellow box. A box addressed to me in unfamiliar writing. European writing, judging by the careful script. Europeans often have neat handwriting, because they believe education is valuable and happily pay taxes to fund decent schools where kids learn to read and write properly. Americans are opposed to taxation, and prefer hiring people to do complicated things like writing for them so they can watch television.

I don’t get boxes from Europe very often, so I was excited.

Well, not excited. But not as depressed as usual.

After gingerly setting the box on the ground, I commanded my German shepherd, Frau Pfannkuchen, to sniff it for drug and bomb residue. Then I leaned over and read the label closely. And that’s when I realized it was from my dear Finnish friends Ziva and M, who live, oddly enough, in Finland.

I tore into the package like a virgin groom undressing his reformed whore of an Italian bride on their wedding night. Except that I wasn’t, you know, uhm, turgid.

Packages excite me, but not that much.

Inside, I found a beautiful card, and brightly colored packages of Finnish confections. Pounds of milk chocolate, several varieties of salmiakki (also known as salty or ammoniated licorice), and a few boxes of something I’d never seen before called Leijona.

Nicky over at We Work For Cheese will vehemently disagree with me about this, but I think salmiakki tastes great, even the stuff that comes in packages marked with scary flames and the skull and crossbones. And the chocolate was some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had.

But I especially liked the Leijona. I don’t know how to describe these treats to Americans, but they’re little things about the size of a shirt-collar button. They’re coal black, coated in sugar crystals and taste like a combination of sweetened asphalt and herbal cough drops.

I loved them.

Ate them all in one sitting, in fact, because they’re as addictive as potato chips.

Which made me sad. No more Leijona.

I wept.

But you know what? Ziva and M heard my cry in the wilderness, and sent me another package filled with boxes and boxes of Leijona just a few weeks later.

Which makes me smile. Not just because I like Leijona so much, but also because I know somebody out there — somebody in a frozen, faraway land called Finland, where kids grow up eating bizarre candy and knowing how to read and write — cares about me enough to break up the monotony of my days with candy.

Sometimes it’s the little things in life, you know?

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Nicky and Mike at We Work For Cheese urged me to join their writing competition this month, and I agreed, thinking it was a little thing. I was wrong, horribly wrong, but I still love them because they’re awesome people, and because maybe I’ll win an autographed photo of Mike or, who knows, a pair of Nicky’s undergarments, which would be fun to hang from my rear-view mirror. For other entries today, please visit them.

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 9: 15 Minutes

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We had 15 minutes to buy my close friend Rick a birthday gift.

My idea was to get him nothing. Men don’t expect birthday gifts, and wouldn’t even remember they had birthdays if their mothers didn’t constantly complain about hard it was to birth them.

“Do you know how hard it was to give birth to you?”

“No, mom, I don’t. I’m told I was there, but my memory of that day is mercifully unclear.”

“Nine pounds seven ounces you weighed! Nine! It was like forcing your father’s Buick through a garden hose with the parking brake on. I’ll never forget the day you were born!”

We were shopping at the local health food store. It isn’t the best place to get birthday gifts unless the recipient is gaga for gluten-free pasta and organic produce.

“Oh, free-range organic kale from the Cooperative Peace Farm and a sugar-free, gluten-free, non-dairy, vegan carob cake! Thank you, it’s exactly what I wanted!”

My wife’s idea was to get Rick a 32-ounce bottle of Alaffia’s Authentic African Black Soap in the tangerine citrus scent.

“It’s the perfect gift for a vegetarian Buddhist because it’s a fair trade product, and the profits are used to promote gender equality and alleviate poverty and that sort of shit,” she said. “Besides, it’s moisturizing and smells wonderful. I love it.”

“I like it, too. But it’s soap.”

“What’s wrong with soap?”

“Soap is boring. Men don’t want soap.”

“What do they want?”

“I don’t know. Nothing?” I lied, knowing full well that all men want three things: electronic gadgets, power tools, and Italian sports cars that come fully equipped with Italian supermodels to ride around with them in those cars, their long scarves blowing freely in the wind.

“We’ll get him the soap. Or we can pay for dinner. But we still have to get him a card.”

“He doesn’t want a card,” I said, not because Rick dislikes cards, but because I dislike shopping for cards. The funny ones aren’t funny, and the rest of them have pictures of puppies or unicorns on them. Sometimes with glitter. I hate glitter. If I get glitter on my face, I practically have to scrub my face off to get rid of it.

So we got a card. Something about skipping broccoli to eat ice cream on your birthday.

Haha! Health food jokes are the best.

And then we bought Rick’s dinner, and gave him the soap plus two dark-chocolate candy bars. He looked happy, but I think the soap puzzled him. Men are confused by the concept of gift soap. Soap is is not a gift, it’s something you buy because you need soap.

I wish I could’ve given him a Ferrari, if only so I could borrow it from him. But he loved the chocolate. I guess if you can’t have a fast car, chocolate is the next best thing.

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I need help, and I’m not getting it from We Work For Cheese, host of this ridiculous meme. What is wrong with me that I would agree to do this for 28 days? Did I kill people in a former life?

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30 Days Minus 2 of Writing, Day 4: Friendship

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Friendship is hard to come by. Even if you’re lucky enough to find another loser to hang out with, the slightest differences can separate you. You love action movies, he loves comedies. You love fast cars, he loves fast women. You love your girlfriend, he loves her, too, mostly because she’s fast.

So imagine how hard it would be to make friends if you didn’t have a face. That was my dilemma after mine unexpectedly fell off at Nancy and Bob Turk’s wedding last year.

There are no advantages to being faceless except that you don’t have to shave. At parties, for instance, people irritate you to death by offering you useless advice.

“Have you considered superglue?”

“The juice of a fresh aloe plant is very good for the skin.”

“My sister had a friend whose second cousin knew somebody who had her face reattached by a forensics expert who used to reconstruct the faces of murder victims for the FBI. Maybe I can get his number for you.”

Eating with people is also a huge problem; You can’t fully appreciate the value of cheeks until you don’t have any. I recently asked a beautiful woman out for lemon-drop martinis and chili, and ended up soaked in a tangy mess of beans and tomato sauce that horrified her so much I abandoned my plan to kiss her goodnight.

Not that I could’ve kissed her anyway. Not without lips. We would’ve had to settle for sucking tongues.

Co-workers can be friends and they try their best to treat me nicely. But it’s challenging because they feel like I’m always staring at them. Plus, they can’t decide if I’m grinning or grimacing when we’re making small talk around the cooler. And if I hear a good joke and make the mistake of belly laughing, the clattering of my teeth can sound like gunfire, sending the office into a panic.

Not that work matters much, because the best jobs for skullheads like me are already taken. There’s not as much call for hot-headed, crime-fighting Ghost Riders as Nicolas Cage might lead you to expect. Haunted house work is strictly seasonal, and in Hollywood talking skulls take a distant backseat to vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies.

About the best employment a faceless person can hope for is stocking shelves late at night at Wal-Mart, and it’s damnably hard to find a friend there you’d want to keep. Most of them already have skulls tattooed on their arms, and it’s disheartening to be constantly reminded you weren’t their first best friend.

So what do I do for friends?

Facebook is out. Too ironic.

Maybe I should get a kitten for company. At least it won’t be able to wake me up in the morning by sitting on my face.

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Well, it’s day four of Nicky and Mike’s blogging challenge, and I’m exhausted. Craving pizza, too, although I doubt it’s related. To read what others are writing, please click here.

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The Rule of 1,000 Humors

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Are you boring?

Of course you are. You wouldn’t be sitting on your ass reading this post about The Rule of 1,000 Humors if you weren’t. You’d be out drinking beer with friends, or skydiving.

Skydiving may be the least-boring sport in the world. There are about 32,000 skydivers in the country, according to the United States Parachute Association. They make nearly 3 million jumps a year, and 20 to 25 of them die, not because falling is dangerous, but because sudden stops from tremendous heights are.

“Analysis of skydiving accidents show that most are caused by jumpers who make mistakes of procedure or judgment,” Skydiving Magazine reports. I agree. It takes a serious error in judgment to strap an oversized blanket to your back and jump out of an airplane. I can’t prove it, but there’s got to be a direct link between drinking beer with friends and parachuting.

Some people, many of them sober, jump out of airplanes without parachutes and live.

In 1944, for instance, 21-year-old British Flight Sergeant Nicholas Stephen Alkemade was flying over Schmallenberg, Germany when the Nazis shot his bomber all to hell. Flames destroyed his parachute, but rather than die in a fiery wreck — one of my least-favorite ways to go — he leapt into the ether and plummeted 18,000 feet into a snow bank, suffering a sprained leg for his trouble. I’ve suffered a sprained leg getting up out my chair to go the bathroom, so I’m impressed. But the Gestapo who captured and interrogated him were so amazed they gave him a certificate of appreciation and turned him into a celebrity prisoner of war, which is way more than most POWs got from the Nazis, who weren’t the friendliest evil-doers in history.

Alkemade went on to be utterly not-boring, and so would you if you bailed out of the tail end of a Frontier Airlines flight without a parachute and survived. They’d probably make a movie out of your life story starring James Franco or Anne Hathaway. You’d also be a highly sought-after TV guest and exceedingly popular with the American Birding Association, American Philatelic Society or whatever boring club you belong to. Oprah might even come out of retirement to interview you, ensuring that you’d never be boring again, especially with women, which if you happen to be a guy, is all that matters in life.

But there is an easier way to be not-boring: You can be funny.

The problem is that not everybody knows how to be funny. Out of the several hundred people I work with, for example, I’d estimate that 10 to 12 are deadly serious workaholics, 5 to 7 are ex-Nazis — not the kind who hand out certificates and gold stars, either — and 2 to 3 are funny. The rest are so nondescript they defy categorization.

Fortunately, I have a solution. It’s called The Rule of 1,000 Humors. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you’re at the annual Christmas party of the National Coin Collecting Association, which is, by definition, boring in the same way that skydiving isn’t boring. And let’s say you anticipated being both bored and boring, and brought a wind-up toy monkey with you to liven things up.

Funny, right?

Of course it is. Nothing’s funnier than a wind-up toy monkey. (If you don’t believe me, check out this video from my good friend and award-winning filmmaker, Ziva.)

Now apply The Rule of 1,000 Humors, which holds that if one one wind-up toy monkey makes people smile, then 100 will make them laugh so hard they pee their pants. So you don’t have to be funny to be not-boring, you just have to be able to wind up 100 toy monkeys.

Better yet, the rule applies to anything funny, from belching and yo-momma jokes to pratfalls and using dirty words like penis. I think we all agree saying penis is funny. But it’s side-splittingly hilarious to say penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, penis.

So stop being so boring. Apply The Rule of 1,000 Humors to your life. Or have a beer or 10 and take up skydiving with your friends. Just don’t come whining to me when your chute fails to open and you die.

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